Fallen Angel, Chris Brookmyre

FALLEN ANGEL was released in 2019. I hate how behind I'm getting with my all time favourite authors, Chris(topher) Brookmyre being very unfairly on that accidental list. His take on people being people, particularly when some of them are flat out horrible people, is always drily delivered, pitch perfectly scathing, funny and flinch-inducingly pointed.

In the case of this novel you've got a couple of family groups, English well to do's with their own villas around a shared pool in Portugal. In 2002 Max Temple is a famous scientist, known for his take-down of a delusional conspiracy theorist compelling Temple to stardom and the delusional one to yet more delusions. He's in Portugal, with his family - wife, Celia, one of those actresses who had one particularly famous part in a movie where she didn't quite wear enough clothes, and their children. The oldest, dedicated mother; the wayward son; and their youngest daughter Sylvie. The accidental death of Sylvie's own daughter, who tragically fell to her death into the sea shatters them at that time. Her body was never found, it's noteworthy just how many conspiracy theories that generates, but in truth, it causes ructions in the family that are felt right through to 2018, when they return to their villas for a family reunion / summoning. Max is recently dead, Sylvie now an ice-cold businesswoman known as Ivy Roan, the eldest daughter and her husband still trying to play peacemakers, the son even more of a walking cliche, and Celia, seemingly desperate to reconnect with the family, reestablish control maybe.

In the remaining of the three villas, the second family is much smaller. Vince was there in 2002 with his first wife when Niamh died. He's supposed to be back in 2018 as well, but it's his second, very young wife Kirsten, their baby son and a young Canadian girl, Amanda, acting as a nanny who arrive without Vince - he's supposedly been unavoidably detained, vanishing from the airport, in the UK. Amanda, coincidentally, is an Internet blogger building a bit of a following.

The highlight of Brookmyre's work is always his characters and the heightened mayhem that he's happy to drop them right into. In this case the Temple family are tense, secretive, divisive, with an odd dynamic, not helped by the weirdness of holidaying up close to Vince's family - people they really only engage with in Portugal. Vince's second wife is slightly on the vacuous side, and Amanda is a perpetually confused nanny. How an internet blogger quite got herself into the position of almost sole carer for somebody else's very young baby is a source of some confusion, but the proximity to the Temple family is intriguing. She smells a story here, aware of the online conspiracy theories about Niamh's death, and Ivy's reactions to her inquisitiveness only serve to make her wonder harder. There is much to ponder here as well - it's a typically Brookmyre inspired scenario - complicated, interconnected, a weird sort of situation with the family politely at each other's throats, and Vince still oddly absent from the bosom of his own.

Of course things will, as always, spiral and the past and present collide spectacularly with just the right amount of WTF and "oh of course" for readers to roll with. There's an emphasis on 2018 style internet activities, blogging, conspiracy theories, judgey comments and wild speculation. The only thing that's missing is the rampant social media references you'd expect of today. There's also a cameo from a very important character right at the end which made me smile. Wherever there's madness and mayhem, there's just about always ....