As a big Christopher Brookmyre fan who fell a little bit out of love with the tartan noir artist when he shortened his name to Chris on the cover of his books, I approached Black Widow – by “Chris” – expecting to be disappointed.
The good news is, I was not. Brookmyre’s best character, the uncompromising/obsessed journalist (so, I’m biased) Jack Parlabane is back – and he’s now a discredited hack and bitter soon-to-be divorcee, to boot.
He is drawn into a dark tale involving an over-achieving female surgeon who burnt her bridges down south after being outed as the author of an aggressively feminist blog, her oddly childlike IT technician husband who is actually the under-achieving son of one of Scotland’s richest men, and his dangerously attractive (to Parlabane, anyway) sister.
The bonus for readers in the north is that this bunch of rag-tag misfits have found themselves thrown together in Inverness. Brookmyre is almost as famous for his often unforgiving descriptions of the places he sets his books as for the plot – Aberdeen has suffered his wrath in the past.
But this time, he is gentler – and it is just nice for a local to try and work out the exact location of the remote cottage where the “murder” (spoiler alert) took place, or which side of Millburn Roundabout the office Parlabane broke into stood.
The book hasn’t quite got the pace of Quite Ugly One Morning – it is a bit more of a Boiling a Frog, guilty of the odd navel-gazing moment – but it’s good, and filled with twists on a small and large scale that you just don’t see coming.
He might prefer to be known as Chris these days, but I would give Mr Brookmyre his full Sunday name for this effort.