All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye - Softcover

Brookmyre, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802127924 ISBN 13: 9780802127921

Publisher: Grove Press, 2018

Synopsis

Internationally bestselling author Christopher Brookmyre has been as lauded for his dark sense of humor as his brilliant suspense plotting. Now available for the first time in the US, this prize-winning Brookmyre classic hits all the usual crime fiction marks: intrigue, espionage, violence, vacuuming.

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. Then her son Ross, a researcher working for an arms manufacturer in Switzerland, is forced to disappear before some rather shady and dangerous characters persuade him to part with the secrets of his research. But they are not the only ones desperate to locate him. Ross’s firm also hires a team of security experts―headed by the enigmatic Bett, they have little in common apart from total professionalism and a thorough dis-regard 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. 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 . . .

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Brookmyre was a journalist before publishing his award-winning debut, Quite Ugly One Morning. He is the author of the Jack Parlabane thriller series, which has sold over 1 million copies in the UK alone, and the acclaimed Jasmine Sharp and Catherine McLeod novels. He has won many awards for his work, including the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Novel of the Year, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award.

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: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0802127924
• ISBN 13: 9780802127921
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416