I really enjoyed Brookmyre's earlier books, with their interesting characters, fast-paced suspense, and wacky humor. I picked this up without reading any reviews, and before I'd started reading it I saw a blurb about how he wasn't doing the funny stuff anymore. I was alarmed, because I loved the satire and humor in his earlier books. Well, I needn't have worried. This book has all his virtues of interesting characters and headlong action and suspense, and it still has humor. The man can't not write humor, but now it's grounded in a gritty crime drama instead of going over the top. No one has anything drop out of the sky onto their head.

The two main characters are a mature police detective, and a fragile twenty-year-old, in Glasgow. The young woman had been working for her uncle, a private investigator, for about a month when he disappears. He's an adult, there's no sign of foul play, and he doesn't have immediate family, so there's no one to investigate but her. She follows up on the cases he was working, and when she gets shot at, she knows she's in way over her head. The police detective is quite confident in her skills, but there's a shakeup happening in Glasgow's gangs, and the bodies keep piling up, and not in predictable ways. You imagine that these must be related, but there's a lot to unravel to get to that point.

Part of the pleasure of a Brookmyre book is the language. One character begins a conversation with "I'm not trying to piss in your chips, but..."