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After another difficult and tiring day at the hospital where he is a medical student, Jonah Stem stumbles across an incident in the street where a woman has just been stabbed by an assailant. Without any thought for the danger he is getting himself into, Jonah rushes to her rescue and in the ensuing struggle her attacker is killed. The real danger that Jonah has got himself into however doesn’t become apparent until quite a while later. Clearly, Jonah’s intervention was an act of heroism not common on New York streets, but this doesn’t prevent the family of the deceased would-be mugger landing a law-suit on the medical student for unlawful killing. But even that is not where the real trouble lies. When the young woman he has rescued expresses her gratitude in makes contact with him and they embark on a dark and torrid affair. But all is not as it seems… With a reasonably intriguing opening, there are any number of directions Trouble could go in. Sadly, Kellerman Jr. goes for the bunny...

Well now, this is a pleasant surprise. Brookmyre’s last novel was the first I had read that managed to really break the familiar though hugely enjoyable formula of all his other books - incompetent terrorists or wannabee gangsters getting into explosive siege situations with high bodycounts and an even higher expletive quotient. It was a formula however that was starting to get a bit stale, but with A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil  Brookmyre showed that he was capable of stretching his range a little bit. Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks  goes much further. It might be slightly toned-down and lacking the usual barrage of one-liners, but Brookmyre’s mordant sarcasm and bitter cynicism is still there, and there is no slacking in the writer’s mischievous debunking of the establishment. If anything, his target in Rubber Ducks  is a rather more pertinent one than the usual government-led conspiracies, small-time ned gangsters and anonymous terrorist orga...