Property might be theft. But the housing market is murder.

My name is Al. I live in wealthy people’s second homes while their real owners are away.

I don’t rob them, I don’t damage anything… I’m more an unofficial house-sitter than an actual criminal.

Life is good.

Or it was – until last night, when my friends and I broke into the wrong place, on the wrong day, and someone wound up dead.

And now … now we’re in a great deal of trouble.

Al (not his real name) finds himself behind bars, penning a memoir all about his life of breaking into vacant properties, second homes, etc that are not being used. He gets in, lives the life of luxury for a few days/weeks, and leaves making sure the place looks just how it did when he arrived and without taking any mementos.

When one of his breaking attempts goes wrong he opts for one of his more frequent houses to crash at but there is a problem, he arrives to discover it occupied by a group of twenty-somethings with similar intentions.

What follows is a rollercoaster ride as Al soon realised that he should just have walked away when he had the chance as his drifting from property to property for years may well just be behind him thanks to the actions of his new friends and a hitman.

A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering is a delightfully light and humorous book that chronicles the escapades of Al, the seasoned interloper. Al is quite a fun character. I loved his enthusiasm for moving from place to place, never having to spend a penny on mortgages, rent, utilities, etc, though he does recognise that he is getting a bit too old now to be breaking into people’s homes. He has a lot of rules that he follows and is very successful at his ‘job’.

The story flowed well and I enjoyed the read. There was plenty of sarcasm and wit between the pages alongside a great plot. The book is written with the reader in mind and Al talks directly to you about his life and how he ended up in the nick.

Overall, I found the book to be engaging and entertaining and I read it in just a few days.

Andrew Hunter Murray is a writer, broadcaster and comedian. He co-hosts the award-winning podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which has been downloaded 500 million times and toured the world, and spent fourteen years writing for BBC2’s QI. He also writes jokes and journalism for Private Eye magazine and hosts the Eye’s podcast, Page 94.

His first novel, The Last Day, was a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller, and one of the top 10 fiction debuts of 2020; his second, The Sanctuary, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month.

Andrew lives in London, in a house which largely belongs to someone else (Barclay’s).