Page Updated: 13/07/2007

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Christopher Brookmyre - Page 2

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away Boiling A Frog One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Not the End of the World Country of the Blind

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British Pbk Original - Abacus (2001)

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
Raymond Ash, a hapless thirty-something teacher finds himself faced with the responsibility for saving Scotland from destruction by a bunch of international terrorists. All he has to help him is a Lora Croft style policewoman, Angelique. Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, for a teacher, he’s something of an expert at ‘running around in caverns and corridors, takin’ on a team of headcases armed to the teeth’- a virtual expert that is.
From before Doom and for more than twenty years, Ray has been roaming those computer generated mazes, getting as much from them as an adult as he had as a geeky teen. Ray is a man who believes if Quake was the new Punk, Tomb Raider was the games world’s Mariah Carey’. He’s about to play the most crucial game of his life.
Of course it helps that while Angelique is facing The Black Spirit, Ray is up against his old ‘fanny of flatmate’. He might be a world-feared terrorist these days, but Ray is willing to bet he’s ‘still a wank’.
'Christopher Brookmyre is a genius' Mirror
'Carl Hiaasen, refined at the Rab C Nesbitt school of guerilla warfare’ Daily Telegraph
'A kind of big-world-view of crime fiction - not dissimilar to the sci-fi expansiveness showed by Iain Banks and Ken McLeod' Sunday Herald
'Quentin Tarentino ... More Die Hard than The Big Sleep' The List
'Compared to all the hip living writers, and a few trendy dead ones too, from Raymond Chandler to Carl Hiaasen ... Billy Connolly ... Quentin Tarantino couldn't produce so many one-liners' The Mirror
'Irvine Welsh out of Ian Rankin' Scotland on Sunday
'Worthy of Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard' The Guardian

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British Pbk Original - Little,Brown (2000)

Boiling A Frog
New century. New parliament. New Scotland. Aye, right.
Though everyone was well used to the government stealing ideas from the Tories, you'd have got long odds on the next one being 'Back to Basics'. But that was before the Edinburgh Executive was banjoed by a sex scandal so odious, even New Labour couldn't spin their way out of it. Now, bedroom morality is once more dominating the political agenda, cabinet careers are back in the gift of the shag-rags, and the clergy are having delusions of relevance.
The churches have done rather well out of the affair in fact, as has former tabloid editor Ian Beadie, who these days operates in “the paramilitary wing” of the PR industry. It's precisely the sort of convenient coincidence that journalist Jack Parlabane was born to investigate. Problem is, he’d have to get out of jail first ... Sex. Perversion. Murder. Floor-polishing.
Boiling A Frog: get ready to turn up the heat.
'Surreal, satirical, irreverent, violent and immenseley funny' The Times
'Eye-wateringly, nose-bubblingly hilarious' The Herald

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Paperback - Abacus (2000)

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night brings Christopher Bookmyre's distinctive, heart-warming style to the touching story of what unfolds when the former pupils of an ordinary Glasgow high school are reunited after fifteen long years; reminiscence, reconciliation, old secrets, rekindled passions, joy, laughter, hijackers, murder, vengeance, machine-guns, rocket-launchers… that sort of thing.
Welcome to the party. Dress casual. Bring your own bullets.
'Die Hard wi' a kilt oan… a tale of extreme violence, bitter revenge and belly laughs' Scotsman
'Furiously-paced and wonderfully absurd, with more one-liners than a Colombian coke dealer' Maxim

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First British Edition Little,Brown (1998)

Not the End of the World
See Review by Lynda Ross
Santa Monica CA, 1999. There's nine months to go but already Sergeant Larry Freeman has had enough of the goddamn millennium - in a town that's never needed excuses to get crazy this latest strain of insanity is something he could seriously live without. Babysitting Hollywood pond-life as LAPD liaison to the American Feature Film Market, he's less than delighted to discover that billionaire televangelist Luther St. John is staging a "Festival of Light" in protest - right across the street.
As if it's not enough to be playing referee between the film market's trash-peddlers and the Festival's moral militia, Larry Freeman's also stuck with trying to figure out how four scientists vanished without trace from a research vessel three hundred miles out in the Pacific. And if he's got any time left over, he can always spend it wondering why the Reverend St. John's cataclysmic predictions sound so worryingly confident.
Into this mounting chaos steps freelance photographer Steff Kennedy: jet-lagged, hungry and about to discover that his native Lanarkshire is not, after all, the global capital of religious stupidity
Bullets. Bombs. Carnage. Slaughter. Depravity. Hysteria. Human sacrifice. Mass destruction. Bad hair. It's not the end of the world, but you can certainly see it from here.
'The defining quality of Brookmyre's writing is that it is perpetually in-your-face: sassy, irreverent, stylish' The Times
'One of the rising stats of the McMafia, the new school of Scottish crime writing ... Brookmyre on full auto-rant is a joy. Brutal, and cutting to the bone' Daily Telegraph
'Quality acerbics about modem movies and about the millennium' The Herald
'Brookmyre should be justly proud of this expansive and enjoyable novel' Scotsman
'Witty, well-organised and vividly peopled', The Sunday Times
'The book's tremendous fun. Partly it's the black humour and snappy, streetwise style, worthy of Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard; partly it's the author's ability to make us empathise with almost anyone ...' The Guardian
'Brookmyre's success owes a lot to his five-star sense of humour and full tank of genuine talent' The Times
'More than hefty doses of humour and action' The List
'A crazy, off-the-wall roller-coaster of a book' Irish Times
'Very entertaining', Marie Claire

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First British Edition Abacus (1997)

Paperback - Abacus (1998)

Country of the Blind
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
HANG THESE BASTARDS NOW!
ran the headline of one now-ownerless Tory tabloid -
a front page rabid even by its own ferocious standards - but then it wasn't every day its proprietor was found slaughtered, allegedly by the four burglars referred to in the headline. Along with his wife and two bodyguards, billionaire media mogul Roland Voss had had a country weekend in Perthshire cut short by a cut throat.
Like many outside Conservative Central Office, journalist Jack Parlabane wasn't exactly crying in his beer over this news - his only regret was that he'd never get to settle his own personal score with the ruthless and vicious tycoon. But as corpses start piling up around the fringes of the investigation, Parlabane begins to suspect Voss might have been taken out on purpose, rather than merely the victim of a robbery-gone-wrong. Besides, although the four accused had form, it was for screwing country mansions, not killing people, and since their leader Tam McInnes finished a long stretch several years back, he'd been clean.
Parlabane's not the only one who thinks the accused might be innocent. Nicole Carrow, a young lawyer with the firm representing McInnes, had a curious meeting with him a few days before Voss sprung a leak. She was given an envelope with instructions to open it unless Tam returned to retrieve it on the following Monday. When he didn't, Nicole opened not only the envelope, but a terrifying new world - a world of danger and deceit, of murder and betrayal, where defence is not a legal game but a fight for your life. A world that Jack Parlabane knows well.
The brilliant follow-up to Quite Ugly One Morning, Christopher Brookmyre's acclaimed and award-winning debut, Country of the Blind confirms Brookmyre's status among the most exciting new writers of the Nineties. Intricately constructed, with dialogue as sharp as the plotting, it is a novel of high adventure that takes us to the dark heart of corrupted power.
'Tartan noir' The Independent
'The next star of the genre seems set to be Christopher Brookmyre (who) rejects the English tradition of James and Rendell in favour of the sassy, nasty, fast style of the Americans Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.' The Guardian
'Country of the Blind is a veritable Alton Towers of a novel' The List
'Country of the Blind… a high octane political thriller doused in stinging satire' The Sunday Times

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