This was Brookmyre’s first book and won him a “First Blood Award” (a U.K. author’s award for best debut crime novel) and it’s easy to see why. The writing is fast-paced, funny, and with the types of twists I’d grown to love in FLETCH creator Gregory MacDonald’s work.

BASIC PLOT:
Hard-boiled investigative reporter Jack Parlabane escapes his past by taking a job in a Scottish paper, only to find himself in the same room as a corpse missing fingers. The dead man is a wealthy doctor from a respecting Edinburgh medical family and Parlabane’s propensity to snoop is in full gear.

I kind of guessed where the ending might be going but still there were enough surprises along the way that it proved to be a good read and I’ll be looking for more Brookmyre novels.

EDIT:
I’ll be reading “Not the End of The World” by him next…