2012 collection of six short stories.
A very short collection at that, only around 27,000 words in
total; as far as I'm aware there's no hardcopy edition, only etext and
audio, because printing it on paper would make it apparent just what a
thin book this is.
place b° is nominally a Parlabane story but mostly a rant against
homoeopathy, where the plot relies on the villain being more gullible
than his victims.
Out of the Flesh
is a monologue to a captured burglar, apparently along the lines of
"scared straight". The Resurrection is a very short piece dealing
with the theft of bodies.
Bampot Central
is rather stronger, seeing Parlabane get involved with the world's
least competent post-office robbery.
Mellow Doubt
has a forcibly-retired terrorist (Simon Darcourt) contemplating his
failures and considering his new life; it's decent, but the Brookmyre
fan has already read it in its original form as most of a chapter in
A Snowball in Hell. Finally,
Playground Football
is a description of football as played by children, which is probably
more interesting if you have fond memories of that sort of thing.
With four of the pieces now freely available on Brookmyre's web site,
one of the missing ones basically a polemic wrapped round a wire
skeleton of plot and the other very slight indeed, I'd recommend
against buying this collection.
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