Shaffer produces an amiable but ultimately hopeless parody

Joe Biden with Barack Obama: the pair are the subject of a parodic new suspense novelGETTY

Fiction: Hope Never Dies: An Obama-Biden Mystery, By Andrew Shaffer, Quirk Books, €13

Hope Never Dies is a murder mystery starring Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and now that you know this, you have laughed at the book’s one actual joke and there is really no need for you to read all 301 of its pages. Andrew Shaffer is an amiable sort of writer – he is the author of something called Fifty ...