Britten & Brulightly by Hannah Berry

Fernandez (known as 'Fern') Britten is a depressed, and slightly crazy, detective known as 'The Heartbreaker' for the number of lives he's wrecked, mostly through taking divorce cases. His partner Brülightly is a talking teabag. Apart from that, this graphic novel has a straightforward story, set in a quaint and nameless (but very noir) English everytown. It rains nearly constantly through this story – it's no wonder Britten is depressed. He hopes that one day he might have some positive impact on someone's life and he takes a case here with that in mind. Britten (and Brulightly) investigates the suspicious suicide of a man named Berni Kudos, and exposes the very odd Kudos family history. This leads to trouble involving large men with guns, religious nuts, and the evil machinations of the Union of Waiters. All of this is brilliantly illustrated, and stylistically similar to a more elaborately drawn Raymond Briggs or Posy Simmonds book. It can be confusing because small and easily overlooked details consistently prove to be important, but there's a sly humour here, barely detectable but here nonetheless, which carries the story along. It's hard to believe that this is writer and illustrator Hannah Berry's debut graphic novel, as it's extraordinarily accomplished. [Keir Hind]