To The Last Page

I used to like it when Christopher Brookmyre had a bee in his bonnet about something. You'd get scathing attacks on the pillars of the establishment in between all the gunfire, explosions and comic terrorist mayhem of his earlier novels. Just as he has moved away from the high bodycount messiness of that limited and repetitive plots, you'd still get glimpses in more recent books of the author's raging contempt for the gutter press, his cynicism for new age spiritualism, his disdain for middle-class complacency, and his hatred for crooked politicians - or just all politicians really. But as his writing took on more of a 'conventional' turn, straying into science-fiction, gaming fantasy and more mainstream crime, it was becoming increasingly evident that Brookmyre of late has definitely lost his edge. Black Widow is however a Jack Parlabane novel, so we're back in the crime genre field, with an investigative journalist who has a rather scathing and cynical attitu...

Discerning book readers are going to want to get clarification on that title before they even consider looking at this book, and rightly so. Yes, as irritating as it might be, that is an American spelling of 'traveller' that has made its way untranslated over to the UK edition. Borderline acceptable. There had better be a good reason however for the questionable punctuation. Where the heck is the apostrophe? Well, discounting grammatical error there are two possible explanations, one of which might even make the Americanisation a little more acceptable. One is that it's a ' Pet Sematary ' name lifted off a sign kind of thing with spelling and grammatical flaws intact, the other is that it's actually a statement. Travelers rest... after a long tiring journey. It could be either or a bit of both. The Stephen King reference is not entirely inappropriate either considering that there are some very obvious influences of ' The Shining ' in Travelers Rest (thi...