Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...

Don't give up, 22 Oct 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.

Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason, 15 Aug 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.

That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".

A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."

Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...

I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.


a revelation, 15 Aug 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...

Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.

Another Stoater!, 31 Jul 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.

Of all writers practising what might loosely be called crime fiction today, Christopher Brookmyre is the one who lends himself least easily to categorisation. There are those eccentric titles, for a start: such as the latest one: A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil. This unwieldy title (as often before) gives an indication of the sardonic quality of his writing, and in that, Brookmyre is reminiscent of his great American colleague, Carl Hiaasen. Like Hiaasen, too, Brookmyre favours eccentric and outrageous plots, but there is always a strong grounding in reality, which gives the humour a decidedly bitter edge.

Internet contact between ex-school friends these days leads to some disturbing encounters, and Brookmyre's version of the scenario is typically murderous. Brookmyre is interested in whether or not the index to future of violent behaviour might be discerned in the school playground. DS Karen Gillespie is bemused by a cack-handed attempt at burning a pair of bodies; this takes place outside Glasgow (in fact, in the area in which she grew up). And in a nearby lodge, strange attempts have been made to clean up what appears to be the same crime, but (as a pathologist points out), everything here is handled as maladroitly as the murder. Two suspects appear, but when Karen discovers that they were at primary school together (along with one of the murder victims), things begin to look like a grisly version of Friends Reunited.

Brookmyre readers will know exactly what to expect from this scenario, and they won't be disappointed. If the level of invention is not as delirious as in previous books, Karen Gillespie is as quirkily characterised as ever.

--Barry Forshaw

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...

Don't give up, 22 Oct 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.

Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason, 15 Aug 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.

That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".

A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."

Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...

I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.


a revelation, 15 Aug 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...

Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.

Another Stoater!, 31 Jul 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.

Brilliant, 11 Nov 2008
Quite frankly one of the funniest books i've ever read.

As usual with Brookmyre there is killing and some gore running through the story but i found it hard to put down in all honesty and some of the school bits had me laughing out loud.

Fantastic

A return to form, 07 May 2008
Just finished this, really enjoyed it. I'd kind of given up on this author, started well, got better (Country of the Blind still his best), carried on for a bit then became very formulaic. But I thought I'd give this a whirl, qualifying my purchase for free delivery as it did. Very glad I did, real cracking stuff from start to end. The memories of school days are spot on, though sadly they have to end at some stage as we catch up with the present. But that's no bad thing, the story of the present is very good too. All in all a great read.

(For some reason, every time I do a review on Amazon there's always a line that comes up asking why people can't rate how helpful they found my review. I'll tell you why, because I can't see where to click to facilitate this feature. Anyway, hope it was helpful, more to the point, hope you enjoyed the book.)

We've all been there, 09 Jan 2008
This is a book that can very easily divide opinions, perhaps because our own school-days are such an emotive subject.

I loved it, my wife was underwhelmed.

From the descriptions of teachers, break-time football matches, and general (mis)behaviour, I was catapulted back a couple of decades, into the thick of the playground jungle. The feelings shown by the central characters are excellently depicted and embarrassingly harsh in their reality.

Bonus points for the gratuitous use of the word "jobby".

In my mind, the murder mystery was an add-on, and brought little value to the book. Perhaps this should have been written simply as memoirs of life in a Scottish primary school?

Brookmyre's last few books have shown that he is trying to expand in other directions than the Hiaasen/ Bateman genre in which Jack Parlabane so firmly rests. More power to him!



takes me back, 29 Nov 2007
Reading Brookmyres description of the Scottish school system of the late seventies and eighties, I found myself transported back in time. Rarely have I read a book which sparks such vivid memories. Couple this with some cracking humour and a decent thriller plot, and it is a book i would thoroughly recommend.

Happiest days of your life......., 08 Oct 2007
This is my fourth Brookmyre and definitely my favourite so far. The last one I read was 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' and although I enjoyed it I found I was wilfully having to suspend my disbelief on virtually every page because the plot was so outrageous. But this was just perfect!

DS Karen Gillespie has a double murder on her hands, and one the victims and both the suspected perpetrators were school-mates of hers. The unravelling of the crime is interwoven with the story of Karen and her peers as they negotiate their way through their school years - from the first day in Primary 1 to the senior school leaving dance. Anyone who experienced a British state education will recognise the shockingly accurate descriptions of the feral nature of many aspects of school life but luckily there is plenty of humour to lighten the darker elements of the tale. If you are roughly the same age as Christopher Brookmyre you will love the references to TV programmes and pop records that will instantly take you back to the 70's and early 80's. Brilliant stuff.

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...

Don't give up, 22 Oct 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.

Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason, 15 Aug 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.

That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".

A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."

Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...

I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.


a revelation, 15 Aug 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...

Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.

Another Stoater!, 31 Jul 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.

Brilliant, 11 Nov 2008
Quite frankly one of the funniest books i've ever read.

As usual with Brookmyre there is killing and some gore running through the story but i found it hard to put down in all honesty and some of the school bits had me laughing out loud.

Fantastic

A return to form, 07 May 2008
Just finished this, really enjoyed it. I'd kind of given up on this author, started well, got better (Country of the Blind still his best), carried on for a bit then became very formulaic. But I thought I'd give this a whirl, qualifying my purchase for free delivery as it did. Very glad I did, real cracking stuff from start to end. The memories of school days are spot on, though sadly they have to end at some stage as we catch up with the present. But that's no bad thing, the story of the present is very good too. All in all a great read.

(For some reason, every time I do a review on Amazon there's always a line that comes up asking why people can't rate how helpful they found my review. I'll tell you why, because I can't see where to click to facilitate this feature. Anyway, hope it was helpful, more to the point, hope you enjoyed the book.)

We've all been there, 09 Jan 2008
This is a book that can very easily divide opinions, perhaps because our own school-days are such an emotive subject.

I loved it, my wife was underwhelmed.

From the descriptions of teachers, break-time football matches, and general (mis)behaviour, I was catapulted back a couple of decades, into the thick of the playground jungle. The feelings shown by the central characters are excellently depicted and embarrassingly harsh in their reality.

Bonus points for the gratuitous use of the word "jobby".

In my mind, the murder mystery was an add-on, and brought little value to the book. Perhaps this should have been written simply as memoirs of life in a Scottish primary school?

Brookmyre's last few books have shown that he is trying to expand in other directions than the Hiaasen/ Bateman genre in which Jack Parlabane so firmly rests. More power to him!



takes me back, 29 Nov 2007
Reading Brookmyres description of the Scottish school system of the late seventies and eighties, I found myself transported back in time. Rarely have I read a book which sparks such vivid memories. Couple this with some cracking humour and a decent thriller plot, and it is a book i would thoroughly recommend.

Happiest days of your life......., 08 Oct 2007
This is my fourth Brookmyre and definitely my favourite so far. The last one I read was 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' and although I enjoyed it I found I was wilfully having to suspend my disbelief on virtually every page because the plot was so outrageous. But this was just perfect!

DS Karen Gillespie has a double murder on her hands, and one the victims and both the suspected perpetrators were school-mates of hers. The unravelling of the crime is interwoven with the story of Karen and her peers as they negotiate their way through their school years - from the first day in Primary 1 to the senior school leaving dance. Anyone who experienced a British state education will recognise the shockingly accurate descriptions of the feral nature of many aspects of school life but luckily there is plenty of humour to lighten the darker elements of the tale. If you are roughly the same age as Christopher Brookmyre you will love the references to TV programmes and pop records that will instantly take you back to the 70's and early 80's. Brilliant stuff.

Quite Funny This Morning, 29 Apr 2008
Jack Parlabane is a journalist who seems to find trouble wherever he goes. After fleeing the United States he finds himself crashing in a friend's flat in Edinburgh. Fast asleep he is unable to hear the murder downstairs, therefore, it's not his fault that the next day after locking himself out he is found in the victim's home trying to jimmy the window. Perhaps being caught by the police for something he did not do will be a blessing in disguise. He is a man with certain talents to uncover dirt where other people refuse to tread. It just so happens that this place is the NHS were the dirt is thicker than most.

`Quite Ugly One Morning' is a crime satire that combines both a good mystery with a biting examination of the NHS. Brookmyre is able to create likable characters and get them to examine real life problems through a comedic lens. The main hero Parlabane is a rogue, but very likable. Through him Brookmyre is able to examine how greed and ignorance is destroying the NHS to the point were you are best off never getting ill. To those not interested in political activism there is nothing to worry about as despite the subject matter the central theme is a crime thriller. This is a genuinely amusing book that tackles a highbrow subject in a new and amusing way.


Reading it again, 09 Jan 2008
I recently re-read Christopher Brookmyre's first book and confirmed that this story was as funny and entertaining as I remembered.

A hilarious opening and entertaining reading throughout. I would not recommend it to everyone, but it is one of the few books my son has actually read and enjoyed in the last few years.

Brookmyre deserves greater success. His writing makes me laugh out loud and that does not happen with many writers these days.

The plots are not predictable and the action never flags.

Brilliant.

Hilarious, 04 Nov 2007
Not really my kind of thing but nobody could dispute the humour. I was laughing out loud.

Very funny, 23 May 2007
Although not quite as tightly plotted as some of Brookmyre's later novels, Quite Ugly One Morning is still a cracking good read, blackly comic and full of wit. Of course, Brookmyre's trademark gruesome violence is much in evidence but it's all very tongue-in-cheek. All in all, an excellent read and a good introdction to this write's work.

Amusing but lacking atmosphere or tension, 27 Feb 2007
I had heard positive things about Christopher Brookmyre and this book seemed generally well received. So I thought I would give it a try.

My first reaction was that I should have tried Brookmyre before. The opening scene is well written and very amusing. Unfortunately, that's the best part of the book. Christopher Brookmyre is a capable writer and he can be very funny but, on this evidence, he is not good enough at prose or comedy to compensate for bland plotting and weak characterisation. The main characters are simply not real enough to carry interest and seem little more than vehicles for the author's wit. Most significantly, there is a lack of atmosphere or tension.

Not a bad book, but not one I would recommend.

Christopher Brookmyre's One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night is a lethal farce in which nothing goes quite according to plan. The mercenaries and terrorists who seize an oil rig converted into an international resort are almost too busy wanting to kill each other to get on with the job, for one thing, and, for another, the group they take hostage are a high-school reunion rather than the conference of the internationally famous they are expecting. One of the high-school year went on to be a famous gangland hardman before reforming, and another is a darkly brilliant comic whose career is on the skids--and a couple more have spent far too much time in the cinema not to know what Bruce Willis would do... This is a splendidly constructed darkly funny novel in which the oddest things prove suddenly lethal and in which the imagined geography of a closed environment is at once a trap, and a playground for heroism, double cross and the sudden discovery of true love. The running gags and knowingness about movies ought to be less amusing than they are, but Brookmyre's underlying affection for ordinary people and contempt for bullies stops them being self-indulgent.

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...

Don't give up, 22 Oct 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.

Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason, 15 Aug 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.

That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".

A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."

Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...

I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.


a revelation, 15 Aug 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...

Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.

Another Stoater!, 31 Jul 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.

Brilliant, 11 Nov 2008
Quite frankly one of the funniest books i've ever read.

As usual with Brookmyre there is killing and some gore running through the story but i found it hard to put down in all honesty and some of the school bits had me laughing out loud.

Fantastic

A return to form, 07 May 2008
Just finished this, really enjoyed it. I'd kind of given up on this author, started well, got better (Country of the Blind still his best), carried on for a bit then became very formulaic. But I thought I'd give this a whirl, qualifying my purchase for free delivery as it did. Very glad I did, real cracking stuff from start to end. The memories of school days are spot on, though sadly they have to end at some stage as we catch up with the present. But that's no bad thing, the story of the present is very good too. All in all a great read.

(For some reason, every time I do a review on Amazon there's always a line that comes up asking why people can't rate how helpful they found my review. I'll tell you why, because I can't see where to click to facilitate this feature. Anyway, hope it was helpful, more to the point, hope you enjoyed the book.)

We've all been there, 09 Jan 2008
This is a book that can very easily divide opinions, perhaps because our own school-days are such an emotive subject.

I loved it, my wife was underwhelmed.

From the descriptions of teachers, break-time football matches, and general (mis)behaviour, I was catapulted back a couple of decades, into the thick of the playground jungle. The feelings shown by the central characters are excellently depicted and embarrassingly harsh in their reality.

Bonus points for the gratuitous use of the word "jobby".

In my mind, the murder mystery was an add-on, and brought little value to the book. Perhaps this should have been written simply as memoirs of life in a Scottish primary school?

Brookmyre's last few books have shown that he is trying to expand in other directions than the Hiaasen/ Bateman genre in which Jack Parlabane so firmly rests. More power to him!



takes me back, 29 Nov 2007
Reading Brookmyres description of the Scottish school system of the late seventies and eighties, I found myself transported back in time. Rarely have I read a book which sparks such vivid memories. Couple this with some cracking humour and a decent thriller plot, and it is a book i would thoroughly recommend.

Happiest days of your life......., 08 Oct 2007
This is my fourth Brookmyre and definitely my favourite so far. The last one I read was 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' and although I enjoyed it I found I was wilfully having to suspend my disbelief on virtually every page because the plot was so outrageous. But this was just perfect!

DS Karen Gillespie has a double murder on her hands, and one the victims and both the suspected perpetrators were school-mates of hers. The unravelling of the crime is interwoven with the story of Karen and her peers as they negotiate their way through their school years - from the first day in Primary 1 to the senior school leaving dance. Anyone who experienced a British state education will recognise the shockingly accurate descriptions of the feral nature of many aspects of school life but luckily there is plenty of humour to lighten the darker elements of the tale. If you are roughly the same age as Christopher Brookmyre you will love the references to TV programmes and pop records that will instantly take you back to the 70's and early 80's. Brilliant stuff.

Quite Funny This Morning, 29 Apr 2008
Jack Parlabane is a journalist who seems to find trouble wherever he goes. After fleeing the United States he finds himself crashing in a friend's flat in Edinburgh. Fast asleep he is unable to hear the murder downstairs, therefore, it's not his fault that the next day after locking himself out he is found in the victim's home trying to jimmy the window. Perhaps being caught by the police for something he did not do will be a blessing in disguise. He is a man with certain talents to uncover dirt where other people refuse to tread. It just so happens that this place is the NHS were the dirt is thicker than most.

`Quite Ugly One Morning' is a crime satire that combines both a good mystery with a biting examination of the NHS. Brookmyre is able to create likable characters and get them to examine real life problems through a comedic lens. The main hero Parlabane is a rogue, but very likable. Through him Brookmyre is able to examine how greed and ignorance is destroying the NHS to the point were you are best off never getting ill. To those not interested in political activism there is nothing to worry about as despite the subject matter the central theme is a crime thriller. This is a genuinely amusing book that tackles a highbrow subject in a new and amusing way.


Reading it again, 09 Jan 2008
I recently re-read Christopher Brookmyre's first book and confirmed that this story was as funny and entertaining as I remembered.

A hilarious opening and entertaining reading throughout. I would not recommend it to everyone, but it is one of the few books my son has actually read and enjoyed in the last few years.

Brookmyre deserves greater success. His writing makes me laugh out loud and that does not happen with many writers these days.

The plots are not predictable and the action never flags.

Brilliant.

Hilarious, 04 Nov 2007
Not really my kind of thing but nobody could dispute the humour. I was laughing out loud.

Very funny, 23 May 2007
Although not quite as tightly plotted as some of Brookmyre's later novels, Quite Ugly One Morning is still a cracking good read, blackly comic and full of wit. Of course, Brookmyre's trademark gruesome violence is much in evidence but it's all very tongue-in-cheek. All in all, an excellent read and a good introdction to this write's work.

Amusing but lacking atmosphere or tension, 27 Feb 2007
I had heard positive things about Christopher Brookmyre and this book seemed generally well received. So I thought I would give it a try.

My first reaction was that I should have tried Brookmyre before. The opening scene is well written and very amusing. Unfortunately, that's the best part of the book. Christopher Brookmyre is a capable writer and he can be very funny but, on this evidence, he is not good enough at prose or comedy to compensate for bland plotting and weak characterisation. The main characters are simply not real enough to carry interest and seem little more than vehicles for the author's wit. Most significantly, there is a lack of atmosphere or tension.

Not a bad book, but not one I would recommend.






Rib-tickling, 01 Dec 2008
Nobody outside Carl Hiassen can write satire as black as Brookmyre. But the Scot's vicious humour surpasses anything the American has ever written.

Mad, and hugely entertaining, 26 May 2008
Typical Brookmyre, and a very good example of why his books are so entertaining. The plot is slightly potty, but really quite cruelly witty -surely striking a chord with all of us who have ever considered attending a school reunion (and possibly considered turning up with an Ak-47 to finish the job! There's very good reasons why most of us loose touch with our old schoolmates).

As with his other books, casting the movie (why isn't there one yet?) can keep you entertained for some while. Wheel out all of your favourite Scottish actors and see who you would prefer.

Violent, daft, and a great laugh from start to finish, this is perfect for an undemanding read in between all that brain stretching stuff I'm sure you normally read!

"Die Hard" with Special Brew ...

Brilliant!!, 01 Sep 2007
This is the second Brookmyre book I have read and I definitely want to continue reading more. It reads like a Glaswegian 'Die Hard' and the dialogue is witty fast and very funny. I loved how the hostages reverted easily back into their roles at high school and the tensions between the gunmen.

Best of the bunch, 01 Aug 2007
In my opinion, having read every Brookmyre novel & short stories, this is his BEST work. The plot sypnosis is familiar to all so no need to go over it.

Most people i assume will find empathy with most of the characters - even the second in command of the mercaneries as his team are killing each other off (ex Loyalist and provo paramiliteries rarely make good co-workers) getting killed off by "amateurs" & to top it all getting the sword of acidic pithy dressing downs from his boss in the style that only a well educated former upper crust army major could muster.

It is a very entertaining read and one that i will read again sometime.

Absolutely fantastic, 23 May 2007
This is the first of Brookmyre's books that I have read, and it's only started me wanting to read the others. It doesn't matter that the story is Die Hard on an oil rig - sit back and enjoy the puns, the witticisms, the black humour and the incredible violence. A hilarious read.

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style moving away from the earlier work and for my tuppence worth not a good move. If you're after the usual Brookmyre story telling then you probably won't be overly impressed with this one. I found it hugely disappointing and even by page 327 of 408 I was toying with not finishing it, something I've not done previously. Bored, bored, bored. Hoping for better next time...

Don't give up, 22 Oct 2008
Read and enjoyed all Brookmyre's previous offerings. Picked this up a couple of weeks ago and put it down a couple of hours later. There is little in the first quarter to incentivise the reader to carry on, I found it rambling , disjointed and dull.
I picked it up again last night, only put it back down when I'd finished. Don't be put off by the first few chapters, stick with it and you will be rewarded with with a thought provoking, page-turner.

Thank goodness for the superstrong lavvy paper of reason, 15 Aug 2008
Jack Parlabane has a problem with unsinkable rubber ducks, those "people who are determined to go on believing in woo, no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present them with". We've all met them, apparently rational adults, suckered into buying bottled water or alternative medicine. A few pages in we discover Parlabane's specific beef is with the belief in ghosts: "it's still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension, and the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off." As a good rationalist, however, he can't avoid a piece of rather compelling evidence about ghosts: the fact that he has just become one. Being dead is bad enough, but the rubber ducks bouncing up and down quacking "I told you so" are infinitely worse.

That single, pungent, pugnacious image - "the lavvy paper of reason" doing its best under trying circumstances - is pure Parlabane. It also points up one of the big themes - the struggle between faith and reason - that makes this novel punch above its crime genre weight. We want to know the truth about the world, but how? Since ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment and the great scientific revolutions of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg, and continuing into the present day, the difficult path has always been to rely upon reason and evidence as the best route to knowledge. The easy option has always been faith - the "act of believing in things for no good reason".

A clue to the author's ambition and inspiration is the book's dedication to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, both in the vanguard of the New Enlightenment. Brookmyre shares their fascination with the psychology of willing self-deception: how do beliefs for which there is an abject lack of reliable evidence thrive? He also shares their determination to do something about it, to expose some of the ways in which such beliefs take hold, by showing us how his characters respond to the pressure to believe. There is the wealthy Bryant Lemuel, who is receiving messages from his dead wife and trying to establish a "Spiritual Science Chair" at Kelvin University. Gabriel Lafayette takes the paranormal "from the end of the pier to the doors of the laboratory" but, according to Parlabane, has more in common with Linda Lovelace - both had "instigated unfeasible feats of swallowing". And why, according to these true believers, don't physicists ever "encounter any evidence of psychic forces"? Not because scientists are really unlucky - they don't see "because they don't believe."

Funnily enough, for this novel - for any novel - to work its magic, you need to believe, to go along with the fiction. When it comes to stories, I like being taken for a ride, I want to believe this is how things are, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first outing with Parlabane. I hadn't read much crime fiction since an adolescent phase collecting (and sometimes reading) second-hand Agatha Christies, and I didn't approach this as a puzzle to be solved (just as well, since I'm pretty slow at that kind of thing). Some seasoned Brookmyre fans have been more measured in their praise: one reviewer suggests this may not be a good first Brookmyre, and others say it's not his best. I defer to their judgement over where this ranks, but for me this was a brilliant introduction. I can see how you can get a kick out of cracking the plot and predicting its twists, but there's more to this novel than finding out the astonishing fact that...

I'd never heard of Christopher Brookmyre until he was interviewed on the radio. I then read his "Dangerous nonsense" piece in the Guardian. It's nearly always a mistake to identify the opinions of a character in fiction with those of the author, but, when it comes to the unsinkable rubber ducks, there's real overlap between Brookmyre and Parlabane, even down to certain phrases: according to C.B., faith needs the "full point-and-laugh treatment" while J.P. stuffs a couple more snooker balls into his phrase and suggests a "merciless point-and-laugh fest". This is an important reason why faith is still around - it's seen as a virtue and is revered rather than ridiculed, even by those who would rather stab their eyes with hot needles than sit through a sermon. The serious point of both author and main character is that "people should be responsible enough to avail themselves of the facts and, where necessary, adjust their beliefs accordingly". It's hard work and can be messy in an unsexy way - sometimes the lavvy paper of reason tears and leaves you with sticky fingers - but it's the best advice to the detective in each of us, to anyone who wants to get at the truth.


a revelation, 15 Aug 2008
I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with Brookmyre before picking this up, and all I can say is that I'm off to buy the rest - thoroughly enjoyable, well written and humourous. Lots of nice observations of Scottish society too...

Loved it - can't wait for amazon to deliver some more.

Another Stoater!, 31 Jul 2008
Christopher Brookmyre never disappoints and this book is no exception. Jack Parlabane is resurrected as the hero - albeit a dead hero - to guide us through the plot with his usual ascerbic wit. I love Brookmyre's use of language - good and bad! If you're easily offended don't read this book but if you are a realist, living in the real world where people swear a lot, pick up this book and enjoy it as much as I did! Fantastic.

Brilliant, 11 Nov 2008
Quite frankly one of the funniest books i've ever read.

As usual with Brookmyre there is killing and some gore running through the story but i found it hard to put down in all honesty and some of the school bits had me laughing out loud.

Fantastic

A return to form, 07 May 2008
Just finished this, really enjoyed it. I'd kind of given up on this author, started well, got better (Country of the Blind still his best), carried on for a bit then became very formulaic. But I thought I'd give this a whirl, qualifying my purchase for free delivery as it did. Very glad I did, real cracking stuff from start to end. The memories of school days are spot on, though sadly they have to end at some stage as we catch up with the present. But that's no bad thing, the story of the present is very good too. All in all a great read.

(For some reason, every time I do a review on Amazon there's always a line that comes up asking why people can't rate how helpful they found my review. I'll tell you why, because I can't see where to click to facilitate this feature. Anyway, hope it was helpful, more to the point, hope you enjoyed the book.)

We've all been there, 09 Jan 2008
This is a book that can very easily divide opinions, perhaps because our own school-days are such an emotive subject.

I loved it, my wife was underwhelmed.

From the descriptions of teachers, break-time football matches, and general (mis)behaviour, I was catapulted back a couple of decades, into the thick of the playground jungle. The feelings shown by the central characters are excellently depicted and embarrassingly harsh in their reality.

Bonus points for the gratuitous use of the word "jobby".

In my mind, the murder mystery was an add-on, and brought little value to the book. Perhaps this should have been written simply as memoirs of life in a Scottish primary school?

Brookmyre's last few books have shown that he is trying to expand in other directions than the Hiaasen/ Bateman genre in which Jack Parlabane so firmly rests. More power to him!



takes me back, 29 Nov 2007
Reading Brookmyres description of the Scottish school system of the late seventies and eighties, I found myself transported back in time. Rarely have I read a book which sparks such vivid memories. Couple this with some cracking humour and a decent thriller plot, and it is a book i would thoroughly recommend.

Happiest days of your life......., 08 Oct 2007
This is my fourth Brookmyre and definitely my favourite so far. The last one I read was 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' and although I enjoyed it I found I was wilfully having to suspend my disbelief on virtually every page because the plot was so outrageous. But this was just perfect!

DS Karen Gillespie has a double murder on her hands, and one the victims and both the suspected perpetrators were school-mates of hers. The unravelling of the crime is interwoven with the story of Karen and her peers as they negotiate their way through their school years - from the first day in Primary 1 to the senior school leaving dance. Anyone who experienced a British state education will recognise the shockingly accurate descriptions of the feral nature of many aspects of school life but luckily there is plenty of humour to lighten the darker elements of the tale. If you are roughly the same age as Christopher Brookmyre you will love the references to TV programmes and pop records that will instantly take you back to the 70's and early 80's. Brilliant stuff.

Quite Funny This Morning, 29 Apr 2008
Jack Parlabane is a journalist who seems to find trouble wherever he goes. After fleeing the United States he finds himself crashing in a friend's flat in Edinburgh. Fast asleep he is unable to hear the murder downstairs, therefore, it's not his fault that the next day after locking himself out he is found in the victim's home trying to jimmy the window. Perhaps being caught by the police for something he did not do will be a blessing in disguise. He is a man with certain talents to uncover dirt where other people refuse to tread. It just so happens that this place is the NHS were the dirt is thicker than most.

`Quite Ugly One Morning' is a crime satire that combines both a good mystery with a biting examination of the NHS. Brookmyre is able to create likable characters and get them to examine real life problems through a comedic lens. The main hero Parlabane is a rogue, but very likable. Through him Brookmyre is able to examine how greed and ignorance is destroying the NHS to the point were you are best off never getting ill. To those not interested in political activism there is nothing to worry about as despite the subject matter the central theme is a crime thriller. This is a genuinely amusing book that tackles a highbrow subject in a new and amusing way.


Reading it again, 09 Jan 2008
I recently re-read Christopher Brookmyre's first book and confirmed that this story was as funny and entertaining as I remembered.

A hilarious opening and entertaining reading throughout. I would not recommend it to everyone, but it is one of the few books my son has actually read and enjoyed in the last few years.

Brookmyre deserves greater success. His writing makes me laugh out loud and that does not happen with many writers these days.

The plots are not predictable and the action never flags.

Brilliant.

Hilarious, 04 Nov 2007
Not really my kind of thing but nobody could dispute the humour. I was laughing out loud.

Very funny, 23 May 2007
Although not quite as tightly plotted as some of Brookmyre's later novels, Quite Ugly One Morning is still a cracking good read, blackly comic and full of wit. Of course, Brookmyre's trademark gruesome violence is much in evidence but it's all very tongue-in-cheek. All in all, an excellent read and a good introdction to this write's work.

Amusing but lacking atmosphere or tension, 27 Feb 2007
I had heard positive things about Christopher Brookmyre and this book seemed generally well received. So I thought I would give it a try.

My first reaction was that I should have tried Brookmyre before. The opening scene is well written and very amusing. Unfortunately, that's the best part of the book. Christopher Brookmyre is a capable writer and he can be very funny but, on this evidence, he is not good enough at prose or comedy to compensate for bland plotting and weak characterisation. The main characters are simply not real enough to carry interest and seem little more than vehicles for the author's wit. Most significantly, there is a lack of atmosphere or tension.

Not a bad book, but not one I would recommend.






Rib-tickling, 01 Dec 2008
Nobody outside Carl Hiassen can write satire as black as Brookmyre. But the Scot's vicious humour surpasses anything the American has ever written.

Mad, and hugely entertaining, 26 May 2008
Typical Brookmyre, and a very good example of why his books are so entertaining. The plot is slightly potty, but really quite cruelly witty -surely striking a chord with all of us who have ever considered attending a school reunion (and possibly considered turning up with an Ak-47 to finish the job! There's very good reasons why most of us loose touch with our old schoolmates).

As with his other books, casting the movie (why isn't there one yet?) can keep you entertained for some while. Wheel out all of your favourite Scottish actors and see who you would prefer.

Violent, daft, and a great laugh from start to finish, this is perfect for an undemanding read in between all that brain stretching stuff I'm sure you normally read!

"Die Hard" with Special Brew ...

Brilliant!!, 01 Sep 2007
This is the second Brookmyre book I have read and I definitely want to continue reading more. It reads like a Glaswegian 'Die Hard' and the dialogue is witty fast and very funny. I loved how the hostages reverted easily back into their roles at high school and the tensions between the gunmen.

Best of the bunch, 01 Aug 2007
In my opinion, having read every Brookmyre novel & short stories, this is his BEST work. The plot sypnosis is familiar to all so no need to go over it.

Most people i assume will find empathy with most of the characters - even the second in command of the mercaneries as his team are killing each other off (ex Loyalist and provo paramiliteries rarely make good co-workers) getting killed off by "amateurs" & to top it all getting the sword of acidic pithy dressing downs from his boss in the style that only a well educated former upper crust army major could muster.

It is a very entertaining read and one that i will read again sometime.

Absolutely fantastic, 23 May 2007
This is the first of Brookmyre's books that I have read, and it's only started me wanting to read the others. It doesn't matter that the story is Die Hard on an oil rig - sit back and enjoy the puns, the witticisms, the black humour and the incredible violence. A hilarious read.

Should be writing speeches for Gordon Brown, 03 Nov 2008
I read Quite Ugly one morning and having run out of Rebus, Elizabeth George and Stuart MacBride books I thought I had found a crime writer to fill the gap
I started to read Country of the Blind and realised that Christopher is left of Gengis Khan!! Mr Brookmyre, you really shouldn't unbalance your books with so much left wing wrath, why don't you contact Gordon Brown - he needs a speech writer who has the sort of imagination you have - how are your economics? On second thoughts you couldn't come up with more dreamed up figures than he does!! I,ve bought one more of your books but I think I will take a rain check and give it to Oxfam!!
Oh Dear! Alan Shepherd

brookmyre is God, 10 Sep 2007
I discovered Chris Brookmyre when I accidentally picked up a copy of "A big boy did it and ran away" prior to going on holiday. The first thirty pages were quite labour intensive however the reward for completing them is astounding. More original than Carl Hiaasen, Brookmyre is unrivalled in terms of satire. His stories are entertaining, at times painfully funny and filled with characters that lack the sort of sacharrin niceness but have humour and valiant vulnerability in equal measure.



Country of the Blind, 05 Mar 2006
“Country of the Blind” is the first novel of Christopher Brookmyre’s that I have read and I can say with a great degree of certainty that after thoroughly enjoying this pacey and exciting thriller that I will be coming back for more.

The book features the exploits of maverick journalist Jack Parlabane and apparently this likeable figure first appeared in one of Brookmyre’s earlier books “Quite Ugly one Morning” however for those like myself who haven’t (yet) read this earlier book this later book is perfectly enjoyable in its own right.

Set against the mounting dissatisfaction at the ineffective and over self-indulgent Tory government of John Major all hell breaks loose when Dutch media mogul Roland Voss is found murdered in a rambling country house in Scotland. Next to Voss’s body is that of his murdered wife and their two slain bodyguards lay outside their room. Almost immediately four likely lads are arrested for the crime including former burglar Thomas McInnes, his son Paul and a very strange guy who likes to be known as Spammy. The one sensible thing Thomas has done is lodged a letter with a lawyer before the crime has taken place. When this lawyer, Nicole Carrow, turns up at the Police station demanding to see her client the last thing she probably expected would be to have an attempt made on her life within hours.

As I say the book has a fantastic and intriguing storyline with lots of plots and sub-plots but for all this it never gets bogged down in detail or gets too clever for its own good. The writing is exciting and keeps the action bowling along at a cracking pace. The only fault I can pick with it is that Brookmyre does at points “write in Scottish” and I’d much rather imagine these accents than try to figure out what the characters are actually saying.

The characters are great fun and the writing is extremely humorous at times. There’s also a goodly portion of political commentary along the way which probably won’t agree with all readers but certainly for those of a left of centre persuasion it will be both poignant and amusing.

I can only really really recommend this book and I will definitely be trying one of his other books very soon.

There's been a murder - part 2, 06 Feb 2005
I have become hooked on Brookmyre even more so now that I have finished 'Country of the Blind'. This book whilst not as good as 'Quite Ugly' is still a right good read, although it does take a wee while to get in to it. Stick with it as will pick up. The dialogue is first class. (In particular look out for Spammy's words of wisdom.) If you read on the bus or the train, prepare to get some funny looks as this book has some (CLICHÉ ALERT!) laugh out loud moments!!

If you decide buy this book - Gaun Yersel!

Another cracker..., 26 Jan 2004
Having been introduced to Brookmyre about six months ago, I have become an addict and ploughed my way through most of his back catalogue. This book, in my opinion, is one of his best with a great plot including murder, double crossing and shady politicians, all mixed up with the author's great sense of humour. Once this book gets into full flow, there is no going back and I found myself reading it wherever I could, unfortunately the amazing character that is Spammy making me laugh out loud whilst on the tube, earning me a few funny looks!! A great read that has fuelled my addiction even more!

Cuold do better - see me, 10 Nov 2008
Mostly I give Christopher Brookmyre's books four or five stars. True I tend not to like books with gratuitous violence of foul language, but he is normally so inventive that I forgive such transgressions. Not so with A snowball in hell! Brookmyre seems always determined to push at the boundaries of acceptability, and I have no problems with that. In this latest book however he doesn't push acceptability; he kicks it out of sight. He takes his hero Angelique de Xavia through an improbable series of events with which she is impotent to cope unless she has guidance her lover Zal!
It could have been a hugely enjoyable romp! It could have been his usual skilful mix of the absurd! It is neither, it misses most of the tests which have previously set Brookmyre apart form mere thriller writers. All this being said, I enjoyed the book, but only give it three stars "As was always stated on my school report "could do better".


Entertaining and inventive cartoon nastiness, 13 Oct 2008
It's always worth buying the latest Brookmyre to see what bit of inventive nastiness he's come up with this time. Where some other authors would make all this mayhem stomach turning and unpleasant, Brookmyre somehow manages to get away with it because it comes across as cartoon violence; sort of "Reservoir Dogs" where the dogs in question are Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg.

There were some excellent plot twists and it's definitely a page-turner, but I didn't like this as much as his previous book (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks), perhaps because the underlying theme there (the inability of people to discount bogus ideas) was stronger than the theme here (the celebrity of non-celebrities; yes, we'd all probably like to dream up some unpleasant fates to visit on participants in Big Brother, or indeed on Endemol executives). So four stars rather than five; if you are familiar with Brookmyre's novels, then you'll probably buy it anyway, but might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't read a couple of previous pieces of his work where the characters here were previously introduced.

Mr Spanks revenge, 01 Oct 2008
This is the second book I have read of CB's and was not dissapointed. I do however have to concede I enjoyed his last book Unsinkable Rubber Ducks more. It's difficult to say why, because both are really well crafted books that keep the reader engaged. I just felt that this didnt quite hit the bullseye regarding any real humour and its slightly convoluted plotline.Having said all that I would really recommend anyone to read a Brookmyre novel.

Not so much Dubh Ardrain as Down a Drain, 23 Sep 2008
This book reads as if it's been written over a period of time with large spaces between each bout of writing. It draws strongly on The Sacred Art of Stealing and shares some of the same characters, however the plot is not nearly as strong as TSAoS. The mini set pieces within the main story don't 'hang' together properly or form a cohesive whole. Brookmyre seems to seek to shock the reader with lots of (senseless) killing and little actual storyline. As with a lot of Brookmyre's work, the story appears to serve as a platform for the author's own political rants. This may fill the pages, but hardly makes it into a page turner. If you liked TSAoS don't think this will be a suitable sequel, it's not a patch.

Massively entertaining, 18 Sep 2008
A hard boiled heroine, a sensitive intelligent hero, a black hearted villain with a passion for indie pop, vicious satire of contemporary media culture, exuberant wit, sufficient plot twists to turn one cross-eyed.

Nope, I can't find anything not to like. A thoroughly recommended and entertaining raead

Worst yet, 11 Nov 2008
Short and sweet review as opposed to the tedious opening chapter(s). Definitely a change of style