Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks – Christopher Brookmyre
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...