by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: October 15, 2009

'A big boy did it and ran away' was the first Christopher Brookmyre novel I read, a couple of years back now. It's a heady mix of international terrorism and petulant rants against popular Indie bands, set against a backdrop of computer game nerdery of the naffest order. And almost everyone in it is Scottish.

Not that I've anything against the Scottish, but after reading both Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange in the past year (not to mention giving up on Feersum Enjinn), I'm getting a bit fed up of reading books which require a degree in linguistics to understand the dialogue. And I HAVE a linguistic degree.

And yet I quickly found myself hunting around for Brookmyre's other books. Am I masochist? Or just very bored?

The answer is, of course, that Brookmyre sensibly reserves the dialect passages for comic relief passages, with just the occasional lapse into Glaswegian for the central protagonists. And a book with guns, pitch black humour, petulant pop culture ranting and vaguely Leftie notions was always going to pique my interest. The fact that one of the central characters is a newly-qualified teacher struggling with 'orrible pupils just clinched the deal for me.

The novel starts pretty much as it goes on, as a youngish man drives to catch a business flight. His interior monologue blasts cars, men who drive them, other business travellers, airport security people, just about everything. Frankly, it's a relief when a bomb goes off, sending his plane careering into the North Sea.

This kind of episode is common in the opening stages of the book as various ordinary people get themselves killed while travelling. Brookmyre is hell-bent on teasing his reader, setting up believable, fully-fleshed characters who could probably carry a novel before slaughtering them after just a few pages.

Eventually, the style settles down a little. Special Branch officer Angelique Xavier learns that all these separate tragedies were masterminded by an ber-terrorist called the Black Spirit.

And as soon as newly-qualified teacher Raymond Ash sees an old university friend that died four years earlier walking through an airport, it's no huge mystery who this terrorist is.

In fact, most of what actually happens in the novel is pretty predictable. Ash is abducted by some gangster types, and two schoolkids inadvertantly tag along. Ash escapes and meets up with Xavier. His information leads her to the terrorists' hideout where they find detailed plans to blow up a major football match

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