All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye - Softcover

C Brookmyre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316726168 ISBN 13: 9780316726160

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 2005

Synopsis

As a teenager Jane Bell had dreamt of playing in the casinos of Monte Carlo in the company of James Bond, but in her punk phase she'd got herself pregnant and by the time she reaches forty-six she's a grandmother, her dreams as dry as the dust her Dyson sucks up from her hall carpet every day. Then her son Ross, a researcher working for an arms manufacturer in Switzerland, is forced to disappear before some characters cut from the same cloth as Blofeld persuade him to part with the secrets of his research. But they are not the only ones desperate to locate him. A team of security experts is hired by Ross's firm: headed by the enigmatic Bett, his staff have little in common apart from total professionalism and a thorough disregard for the law. Bett believes the key to Ross's whereabouts is his mother, and in one respect he is right, but even he is taken aback by the verve underlying her determination to secure her son's safety as she learns the black arts of quiet subterfuge and violent attack. The teenage dreams of fast cars, high-tech firepower and extreme action had always promised to be fun and games, but in real life it's likely someone is going to lose an eye...Visit the author's website at www brookmyre. co.uk

About this title

About the Author

Chris Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full time novelist with the publication of QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING. Since the publication of A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY he and his family decided to move away from Aberdeen and now lives near Glasgow.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bett knew everyone's past, but nobody knew his. There were fragments one could piece together, clues in remarks and logical assumptions, but they didn't render a whole that was either coherent or remotely vivid. Some military involvement, obviously. Police work, here in France and possibly further afield. No wife, no children, no siblings or parents ever referred to. Multilingual. First language: pick one from three. Accent unplaceable. Provenance unknowable. A cipher, and yet known in certain influential circles. Private, and yet highly connected. Cold, and yet conscientiously loyal. Solitary, and yet surrounding himself with cohorts, generally much younger, who were energetic and often immature.

Bett collected them, brought to his attention by shadowy contacts and murkily submerged channels of information. Rescued them, no question, from each of their secret pasts, but he kept hold of those secrets too, an unspoken but ever-looming means of leverage. His employees were thus a remarkable raggle-taggle of waifs and strays, who found themselves grateful but beholden, and not a little scared. Lex didn't know anyone else's story for certain, but guessed they would share a number of elements, prominent among them a precipitous epiphany regarding the price a single rash act could exact from what one only now realised had been a bright future.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0316726168
• ISBN 13: 9780316726160
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416