Funny, as per usual.It's a brilliant book when you don't know what's going to happen. Probably won't include it in my next Brookmyre re-reading spree though, because with the deception gone and plot twist anticipated (as I was reading it second time) I found myself little tired of the ever-presen...
My feelings on this book are hard to pinpoint. It was an incredibly slow start to the book. Many times I felt like I was simply reading a physics textbook and felt like it was a little over my head every now and again. By the time I read half of the book, I was asking myself "Where are the demons...
2014 Book Lovers Calendar - Friday, September 5, 2014:This is the first of a crime series set in Glasgow, Scotland and featuring two female sleuths. One is Detective Inspector Catherine McLeod and the other is Private Investigator Jasmine Sharp. Brookmyre does a fantastic job of fleshing out th...
When I began the Jasmine Sharp series, I seriously doubted that I would finish them, let alone give this 5 stars. It feels like Brookmyre has written the previous two novels simply to set this up.I won't give anything away, which makes it hard to review in any depth, but suffice to say this is si...
The second Jack Parlabane mystery finds four burglars robbing a mansion and finding the occupants already murdered. The occupants are media mogul Roland Voss (of comparable stature to Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch), his wife, and their two security guards, and naturally the media descend on ...
I like to think that I’m a pretty open minded reader, I will give any genre a go and always finish a book no matter how dire it is. My boyfriend is the complete opposite. For him reading consists of Christopher Brookmyre, Christopher Brookmyre and Christopher Brookmyre. I thought this author must...
I saw this author's stuff in bookshops in the UK - he was one of the top sellers there at the time, but little known in the USA. What I got turned out to be a good subway book, a page turner that is a little smarter and a lot funnier than most. All in all, an enjoyable if not very enlightening re...
Gruesome but very funny shenanigans in this novel with Brookmyre’s Jack Parlabane in pursuit of one Stephen Lime, an obnoxious Thatcherite businessman who is fleecing the NHS and seeking to get rich quick by closing a geriatric hospital and flogging its prime site in the centre of Edinburgh to a ...
You know the feeling that you get when you pick a book randomly out of the bookshelf in a book store or a library, hoping it would be at least not a total sh*t, and it turns out to be a great book? That was how I feel about this book. It was not totally random, actually. Thanks to Nick Hornby, la...
"Something dumb and fun", my self-prescription read, following Katie Ward-induced torpor. Well, noone, least of all me, would accuse Christopher Brookmyre of being dumb, but his brutal intelligence is purely at a textual level - the wordplay, the plot, the jokes - as opposed to some wanky meta-b...
I was very annoyed to find out that this would be the last of the Parlabane books. That he would die and that he would be killed off by a psychic was just too much. I was going to register my protest by not reading the damn thing – I mean, who do these damn authors think they are? They create ...
Just one double period to go and then home for tea, before the school disco tonight. Should be a laugh. Plus he’ll get to see all the lassies dressed up, though seeing is about as much as Robbie will have a chance of. Doesn’t matter. The lassies in his year are all fucking cows and sn...
When Larry woke up that morning he found that the bedroom TV was still on, he and Sophie having fallen asleep watching it the night before. It was tuned to HBO. Bill Murray was reaching across a double bed to find that Andie MacDowell was no longer there, Sonny, Cher and two DJs telling him once ...
Actually it was my right breast, but there was something symbolic about it that felt more like a rite of passage than when we were both finally in the altogether. It was at his parents’ house on a Thursday morning before Christmas when we were both in sixth year. I had stayed overnight, which was...
So often she’d heard the term ‘out-of-body experience’ and thought it so much mumbo-jumbo. She knew what it meant now: a defence mechanism, detaching you from your present circumstances because you couldn’t bear the view from within. She had been drugged, she was sure. Something in her tea, most ...
There was a bottle of Loch Dhu on Angelique’s desk when she came back from the sandwich shop with her breakfast. It was a gimmick whisky dreamed up by a marketing man rather than a stillman, its hopefully saleable distinction being that it was black. Really black. Not just darkly peaty like Laphr...
Jasmine pondered briefly whether William Bain would turn out to be considerably older and more infirm than the most recent photo suggested, but then she noted the laminated badge pinned to the woman’s chest. It was issued by Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and identified her as ‘Margaret Bain...
‘Flowers and balloons maybe?’ ‘I think my warrant card will suffice,’ Catherine told her. They were standing at an arrival gate at Edinburgh airport, waiting to intercept Gordon Ewart after he disembarked his flight from Heathrow. Catherine had made several fruitless attempts to contact him throu...
It had spotted him a few yards back and instinctively homed in on its prey, recognising that look in his eye and reacting without mercy. Some kind of sixth sense told cats which person in any given room most detested or was allergic to their species, so that they knew precisely whose lap to leap ...