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"When small-time heroin dealer Jai McDiarmid turns up dead one fine Glasgow morning, no one is that surprised. A heroin dealer openly sleeping with a big-time drug trafficker's girlfriend, Jai had made a lot of enemies in a city with little patience for those stirring up trouble. As a result, Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod has no shortage of early leads on the case when she is assigned to investigate it. Meanwhile, out-of-work actress Jasmine Sharp is facing more pressing problems. She's agreed to help out her "Uncle" Jim with his private investigation work, but is having trouble learning the ropes. As a former actress, lying to people comes naturally to Jasmine, but she's less adept at tailing her targets and remaining undercover. She's facing a steep learning curve-and is thrown in at the deep end when Uncle Jim goes missing and she realizes that it's going to be up to her to find him."--Publisher's website.… (more)
User reviews
This book has less humour and plays less like a movie in my head than
I thoroughly recommend this book to both current Brookmyre fans and those who haven't tried his work before.
'This is Glesca.'... 'Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact: this is Glesca. We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra...'.
Phew. Brookmyre without a rant ... well ... I'd have to double check that the earth's rotation was still in alignment.
But is this good crime fiction? Yes. In a nutshell. It's very good crime fiction. It's a nice, complicated, and very believable plot. It's full of the sorts of cunning and stupidity that you expect from the cops and crooks. There's dedication, there's a bit of the past coming forward to screw with the present, the interlacing of worlds over many generations. There's also more than enough twists and turns, and even a couple of lovely poignant moments. There's some hugely funny moments, there's some poignant ones as well. One of Brookmyre's talents has always been to create very believable, human characters. McLeod is a marvellous combination of a dedicated, clever senior cop with a home life and all the doubts and insecurities that lots of people with rotten jobs have about hanging onto everything they hold dear. Another main character - Jasmine Sharp, niece of a missing ex-cop, private detective - recently bereaved when her mother and sole parent died, Jasmine's a bit of a mess, to put it mildly. She's not the world's greatest trainee private detective, but she gets points for being a very dedicated workmate and friend to her boss. Two excellent female characters, different from each other, but the same in many ways, Brookmyre's also created a supporting cast who work with these two extremely well. Okay there's one scenario that's a bit hard to swallow at the start of the book - but the end of the book explains it all - and besides that, it wasn't until I was well into the action that the lightbulb went off and this reader suddenly went... what the?
That's the other thing that works in WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED, as it does in any Brookmyre book. The pace is fantastic. The action rolls on, the people do their thing, the tension rises, the reader loses sleep.
There's nothing worse than a panic over where one of your favourite authors is going. Dismiss it from your minds. Chris / Christopher / Mr Brookmyre, whatever he and his publishers want to call him knows how to write books. Very good books. WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED is one of them.
When Jasmine’s Uncle Jim disappears her investigations lead her to Glen Fallan, one of Glasgow’s hard men who died twenty years ago and Catherine is called in to investigate the murder of Jai McDiarmid, ‘first officer of the Fallside Fleet’ you know that its not going to be long before their paths cross. Brookmyre’s trademarks are here, his dark, sometime bleak humour – this is Glasgow, where ‘they don’t do whodunit. They do score-settling. They do vendettas. They do petty revenge’ – and a strongly plotted story, which keeps you guessing, is a real page turner as it has its fair share of twists and turns. But the real joy is in his characterisation of Catherine and Jasmine, they both feel very real and this drives the plot. Fantastic.
Elsewhere in the city, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp is reluctantly – and incompetently – earning a crust working for her Uncle Jim’s private investigation business. When Jim goes missing, Jasmine has to take on the investigator mantle for real and her only lead points to Glen Fallan, a gangland enforcer and professional assassin whose reputation is rendered only slightly less terrifying by having been dead for twenty years. Cautiously tracing an accomplished killer’s footsteps, Jasmine stumbles into a web of corruption and decades-hidden secrets that could tear apart an entire police force – if she can stay alive long enough to tell the tale.
Having not read any of Christopher/Chris Brookmyre previous novels so cannot comment on how this ‘off piste’ novel compares but I loved it!
The two female leads were especially well drawn, the contrast between middle aged, married, world weary Catherine and innocent, fragile teenager Jasmine. I love it when a male author ‘gets’ the female psyche .
The writing is fast paced with enough twists, turns and red herrings to satisfy the most demanding of crime readers. It is only as you finish the book that the reader can appreciate how tightly y the story was woven. The sardonic, dark wit is pitch-perfect and made me smile far too often considering the subject matter. This is very, very good crime fiction.
'This is Glesca.'... 'Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact: this is Glesca. We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra...'..
"It didn't really seem like Glasgow at all. Apart from the guy lying on the deck in the advanced stages of a severe kicking. That was as authentically local as haggis suppers and lung cancer."
Elsewhere in the city, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp is reluctantly – and incompetently – earning a crust working for her Uncle Jim’s private investigation business. When Jim goes missing, Jasmine has to take on the investigator mantle for real and her only lead points to Glen Fallan, a gangland enforcer and professional assassin whose reputation is rendered only slightly less terrifying by having been dead for twenty years. Cautiously tracing an accomplished killer’s footsteps, Jasmine stumbles into a web of corruption and decades-hidden secrets that could tear apart an entire police force – if she can stay alive long enough to tell the tale.
Having not read any of Christopher/Chris Brookmyre previous novels so cannot comment on how this ‘off piste’ novel compares but I loved it!
The two female leads were especially well drawn, the contrast between middle aged, married, world weary Catherine and innocent, fragile teenager Jasmine. I love it when a male author ‘gets’ the female psyche .
The writing is fast paced with enough twists, turns and red herrings to satisfy the most demanding of crime readers. It is only as you finish the book that the reader can appreciate how tightly y the story was woven. The sardonic, dark wit is pitch-perfect and made me smile far too often considering the subject matter. This is very, very good crime fiction.
'This is Glesca.'... 'Any time you're confused, take a wee minute to remind yourself of that inescapable fact: this is Glesca. We don't do subtle, we don't do nuanced, we don't do conspiracy. We do pish-heid bampot bludgeoning his girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoid rage induced by forty-eight hours straight on the batter. We do coked-up neds jumping on a guy's heid outside a nightclub because he looked at them funny. We do drug-dealing gangster rockets shooting other drug-dealing gangster rockets as comeback for something almost identical a fortnight ago. We do bam-on-bam. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious. We do cannaemisswhodunit. When you hear hoofbeats on Sauchiehall Street, it's gaunny be a horse, no' a zebra...'..
"It didn't really seem like Glasgow at all. Apart from the guy lying on the deck in the advanced stages of a severe kicking. That was as authentically local as haggis suppers and lung cancer."
The book starts with two separate threads, put into alternating chapters. One features a young woman, Jasmine Sharp, who has just started working for her private investigator relative. She's been through a rough patch recently, her mother died and she dropped out
The other part of the book features Catherine McCleod, a DS in the Glasgow police, who is assigned to the murder of a crime gang figure whose body is found near the trash bins of a business he owns, having been beaten and tortured before he was killed. She is married and the mother of two boys, and we get alot about her personal life as well as the investigation.
Jasmine's investigation leads her to a DV shelter, where a man, Tron Ingrams, works providing handyman skills and apparently some protection also, and while she is driving with him, their car is attacked and shot at by unknown men in another vehicle. Tron decides to go with Jasmine to try to figure out why she/he/or they were targeted, and I found that this character gave the book most of its life. He brings alot of tension, energy and spirit to the book, both in his relationship with Jasmine, but also with DS McCleod, who has an intense dislike for him. I plan to read the rest of the books of this series (two more have already been written) and they are marketed as “Jasmine Sharp and DS McCleod” stories, but I hope that this other character is included.
This is the first book of a series that is distinctly more serious than the author’s previous work. That’s not to say this book is lacking in the humour that Mr. Brookmyre is renowned for as there is plenty to be found in the banter between the police and their discourse with the local hoodlums. There’s just less of the situational comedy used in previous releases. The reader follows the two streams through twists and turns until they converge and provide a well-plotted and paced mystery novel with the added bonus of having not one but two strong female leads. Having been a fan of Christopher Brookmyre’s work for a while it’s good to know I can follow Chris Brookmyre’s releases just as avidly.
So what does actually happen. It starts with what appears to be a Glasgow Gangland killing. We then follow the story via two sets of lead characters: Jasmine, a drama student turned PI who is helping out her ex-cop Uncle and Catherine a Glasgow detective investigating the aforementioned killing. Initially they are looking at very different crimes but, as is traditional with Brookmyre, they all intersect in the end. I doubt if that is much of a spoiler for you.
As far as the characters are concerned, they are nicely drawn and the dialogue is snappy and full of Glesca humour. I didn't like Jasmine initally, but warmed to her a little by the end. I though Catherine was an excellent character and the various other police worked well. Particularly liked Tron even thought I had worked out the
twists in his story quite early on.
I'll happily continue to be a fan of Christopher Brookmyre & will read the next one when it makes it to paperback. Just hope he's going to carry forward Catherine as well as Jasmine!
There is a drugs war, A private eye goes missing his niece Jasmine Sharp is worried about him.
She enlists the help of a dangerous stranger who has been away from Glasgow a long time.
Police are also investigating the deaths of some criminals.
OK book with a few secrets
I dated this as 3 stars, only because I didn't find it as really riveting. The two, seemingly unrelated, storylines kept me wondering when they would merge. Instead of adding to the mystery I found it to be a bit distracting. The storyline(s) formed a complex,