To The Last Page

I admire how Chris Brookmyre manages to continually reinvent and stretch himself as a writer, but he can be frustratingly inconsistent. From his early explosive Tartan terrorism, incompetent killers and Jack Parlabane works he slipped into a series of inoffensive Jasmine Sharp crime thrillers lacking in any real personality and then spun off in all kinds of directions. Lately though we’ve seen some of his best work in such diverse genres as science-fiction ( Places in the Darkness ) and period medical drama thrillers co-written as ‘Ambrose Parry’ ( The Way of All Flesh , The Art of Dying ). Black Widow won awards and acclaim but didn’t convince me, while on the other hand in his last brilliant thriller Fallen Angel may have been his best writing yet. Whatever else The Cut might be then, you can be sure it’s going to be unpredictable. Brookmyre opens The Cut with two amusingly confrontational characters and a conventional prologue that promises some murder intrigue involving both. W...