I got my copy yesterday. I didn’t pre-order, in the end, deciding that actually walking into a book shop, paying for it and carrying it away would be a more satisfying experience.

First impression: the cover took me a little by surprise. The cover illustration you see here (from Amazon) is not the full cover; the front cover, spine and back cover images are each inset, on a plain white ground, so the Tibetan seal you see at lower left is split between the inset front and spine images. Strange. Also, I had noted previously, based on the digital image of the cover, that the sans serif type face overprinted a serif version knocked back behind. Now I have the book, I see that the serif version overprints another (serif bold) setting of the type, knocked back further still. Hmmm.
Now, to the text, and to the first notable quote of the book:

“How many times,” continued Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all manifestations of the slack, “have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?”

We are deep into boys’ adventure yarn pastiche, and this isn’t going to push everyone’s buttons quite the way it does mine, but after reading the first five or six pages on the bus home, I’m having my fevered anticipations confirmed…

UPDATE: first visit to the dictionary. Absquatulate — what a perfectly splendid mock-Latinism, meaning to do a runner.