Excellent first novel, moving from farce to thriller.
Christopher Brookmyre's first novel won instant critical acclaim. It's a fast-paced, off-beat thriller which begins as a farce and develops a critical political agenda as the storyline unfolds. Written against a background, or at least a legacy of Thatcher's Britain, Brookmyre explores the world of privatised medicine, hospital trusts, and the onslaught on the National Health Service launched by the Iron Lady's regime.

The hero of the novel is an investigative journalist by the name of Jack Parlabane, newly returned to Edinburgh from a spell in Los Angeles. There's a certain irony in the choice - Brookmyre was himself a journalist, but investigative journalism was fast disappearing in the face of the cult of celebrity and newspapers and magazines devoting themselves to the profits of pap, pulp, and conspicuous consumption ... not to mention adverts for privatised medicine.

Parlabane, however, sets about investigating the murder of his neighbour, aided by a couple of female sidekicks. At least half the characters in the book bear the names of famous fictional detectives or villains, so there's an element of homage here. There's also a real element of anger - the NHS was being as violently assaulted as the murder victim, and Brookmyre makes a point that elements of the medical profession were quite happy to collaborate in this. He delivers a stinging commentary on the career structure of medicine, in which status and profits come before patients and care ... and politicians and hospital administrators pretended they weren't just barrow boys in expensive suits - "You wanna cheap liver, guv?"

Edinburgh also comes in for a bit of a bashing in places - it's a city which has been colonised by the English middle classes and which has lost (many in Scotland would say sold out) much of its Scottish identity. There's a distinctly Scots angle to Brookmyre's writing, even if his use of Scots language is kept to a minimum - every Scots writer has to make a decision about writing in English or Scots, the decision being heavily constrained by the fact that no publisher is going to publish anything which can't be marketed to an English-speaking audience.

A funny, entertaining, and page-turning novel, it is marred in places by too much exposition. It follows a plot-driven dynamic rather a character-driven one, but it's definitely a very good read and a novel which will have you looking for more ("Country of the Blind" is the next title).

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