Waiting for Godalming is the 22nd book by Robert Rankin

Robert Rankin

Robert Fleming Rankin is a prolific British humorous novelist. Born in Parsons Green, London, he started writing in the late 1970s, and first entered the bestsellers lists with Snuff Fiction in 1999, by which time his previous eighteen books had sold around one million copies...

. Its title parodies that of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

s play Waiting For Godot

Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...

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Waiting for Godalming tells the story of the ultimate murder case: God himself has been killed in a dark alley. Lazlo Woodbine

Lazlo Woodbine

Lazlo Woodbine is a fictional character in some of Robert Rankin's novels - generally portrayed as a metafictional character, being in the novels themselves the creation of mystery writer P.P...

, famous fifties private eye sets out to solve the case. The prime suspects are Colin, God's other son who has been left out of the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

and Eartha, His wife - who hired Lazlo in the first place to solve the case.
The second plot line is about Icarus Smith, who is trying to find out why demons are walking the earth.
As might be expected, both lines knot together in quite a surprising way.