Country of the Blind by
Christopher Brookmyre
pbk out July 98
(Abacus)
at £6.99
It's the last days of a dying Tory government still convinced they can win another term. Then key supporter and media mogul Roland Voss is found slaughtered with his wife and bodyguards in a remote Scottish country mansion. The culprits seem obvious - a gang of car workers turned burglars calling themselves the Robbing Hoods are caught literally red-handed, stained with Voss's blood, right in the frame.
This being Christopher Brookmyre, frame is the key word. His journalist hero Jack Parlabane is a man who can't see a street mugging without imagining the conspiracy -- political, social and legal - lurking in the shadows behind it. And this is a case that reeks of bad faith and worse behaviour.
Linking up with bemused baby defence lawyer Nicole Carrow provides Parlabane with the inside track in the investigation as well as a damsel in distress who is forced to listen to Parlabane's scathingly funny rants about the evils of Tory rule, the vagaries of Scottish football and the difficulties of finding a good deed in a dirty world.
Brookmyre, who won the critics' First Blood award with his debut novel, is a romantic socialist in love with language, and the fault line that runs through this often exuberant and blackly witty excoriation of British society is his tendency to use ten words where three would have struck straight to the heart. Even so, it still gave me more genuine pleasure than almost anything else I've read this winter.
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
Country of the Blind by
Christopher Brookmyre