Country of the Blind
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The murder of a controversial Scottish media mogul ignites "a high-octane political thriller doused in stinging satire" (The Sunday Times).
Just when left-leaning journalist Jack Parlabane trades in his muckraking career for domestic quietude, the muck comes calling. Conservative tabloid tycoon Roland Voss, his wife, and their two ineffectual bodyguards have been found murdered at Voss's country estate. An arrest has been made, the media is pouncing, and Parlabane smells a fix.
So does public defender Nicole Carrow. The pigeon is her former client, a harmless Robin Hood burglar now accused of breaking parole most spectacularly. But this is no simple frame-up. It's a high-level conspiracy. Parlabane and Carrow are determined to do right—even as so many things are about to go wrong.
Jack Parlabane, the hero of Christopher Brookmyre's acclaimed series returns—along with the author's trademark "sassy, nasty fast style of . . . Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen" (The Guardian).
"Brookmyre . . . twists his plotlines, throws out terrific one-liners, piles up corpses and contrives narrow escapes with the impeccable timing of a Swiss watchmaker. If there's a code for fulfilling the requirements of a witty crime caper, surely he's cracked it." —The New York Times
"A biting, violent, fiendishly funny story. . . for all lovers of hip, intelligent, action-packed crime thrillers." —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Glasgow's crusading muckraker Jack Parlabane returns in the fifth novel from journalist Brookmyre (Quite Ugly One Morning; One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night; etc.). A plucky English lawyer, Nicole Carrow (out to make it as a public defender in Scotland to rebel against her dad), is finding out she got more than she bargained for with potential clients like Mrs. McGrotty "an elephantine creature in a shapeless brown coat that looked like it had been fashioned from dog-pelts and then dragged behind a heavy goods vehicle for a couple of days." Then she's approached by a strangely courteous ex-con named Tam McInnes, who gives her an envelope full of evidence of a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of British commerce and government. Shortly afterwards, billionaire media mogul Roland Voss is brutally murdered, and McInnes and three others (including his son, Paul, and Paul's hilariously dissipated roommate, Spammy) have been artfully set up to take the fall. The only one to believe Nicole, however, is the ever-suspicious Parlabane, who knows good media manipulation when he sees it. More murders and a daring jailbreak (or is it another setup?) send McInnes & Co. into hiding and stir up a national manhunt, while back in Glasgow Parlabane races to expose the scam. While the plot may sound hackneyed, Brookmyre's deft character sketches, street-level dialect and mercilessly satirical observations of cross-border politics, journalism and human zaniness keep this good-sized novel moving smoothly along. The U.K. press has called Brookmyre a Scottish analogue to Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard; Country of the Blind actually proves it. .
