2004 tartan noir. Jack Parlabane is invited to the junket weekend of a
new firm that plans to run team-building retreats with a twist. But
that twist is going to turn out to be rather more twisted than anyone
expects.
In fact this is in some respects a re-run of One Fine Day in the
Middle of the Night: a group of people in an isolated location is
attacked, for reasons that are not at first obvious, by a group of not
entirely competent, but well-equipped, military types. But this time
the location is a Scottish manor house, and the people and the reasons
are quite different.
Because this is a Parlabane book, and that means Brookmyre's take on
politics. This is never what one might call subtle, though here he
does at least admit that the radical smash-things-up lefties of the
1980s may have been as wrong as the radical smash-things-up righties.
It's a curious mixture of thoroughly grown-up thinking about the
benefits of the rule of law with reflexive hatred of anything with the
"wrong" party's label on it.
But this is also a tartan noir period Brookmyre, so it includes
cannibalism, vomiting, an awful lot of decapitation, a flamethrower,
and a truly disgusting climbing rope (though I'm not at all convinced
that it would actually work). Fortunately nobody's using guns this
time: it's all blades, for reasons which largely make sense, so
there's no gun detail to be got wrong… even if a rapier is described
as having a tremendously sharp blade; well, some of them did. On the
other hand, a key plot point is that mobile phones won't work at all,
even for emergency calls, with the SIM cards removed; I know that
isn't true of 3G phones, which were available in 2004, and to the best
of my recollection it wasn't true of 2G phones either…
That's not the important stuff, though. The important stuff is the
people; they're all well developed eventually, though this is left
quite late in some cases, leading to a confusion as to just who's who
which didn't happen in One Fine Day even though the cast here is
rather smaller. I think a key difference is that everyone's in the
same group and situation, rather than being split up as they were in
the other book, so context is of no use in remembering who's who, and
most of them use pretty much the same style of speech. Which one's
Toby again? And why does Kathy do nothing but patch people up and
scream?
Most importantly, this is the book where the recurring character of
Tim "Death's Dark" Vale finally gets a significant amount of narrative
time. He's mentioned occasionally in other Brookmyres, and has a minor
role in One Fine Day, but here, quite clearly, things would have
gone extremely differently if he hadn't been on site. Frankly I found
him rather more interesting than Parlabane and I could have done with
more books about him. (There are references to Parlabane's earlier
cases, which reveal the resolutions of Country of the Blind and
Quite Ugly One Morning; you don't need to have read those books
before reading this, but you won't enjoy them as much if you read them
for the first time afterwards.)
It's the villains that really fail to satisfy; they're the
least-developed of the lot, and they never quite seem to make sense
even on their own terms. They're comic-book characters trying to
function in a universe that's generally rather closer to the real
world. Perhaps as a result, none of the puzzles is particularly
challenging; where One Fine Day let us find out what was going on as
the protagonists did, here the solutions are spoon-fed to us well in
advance.
It's still jolly good, but cracks are definitely showing. Followed in
the Parlabane series by Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks.
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