My return to series in the car is currently alternating between Terry Pratchett's Discworld books and all of Christopher Brookmyre's early work. Both of them are an utter joy to listen to, and a potential threat to life and limb.
Car journeys here are, by necessity, long. Everywhere is around an hour away - at 100ks, on country roads, dodging potholes big enough to lose the car in, huge grain or hay hauling trucks, assorted wildlife from the kill you type (kangaroos) to the don't you dare kill them ones (echidna's and blue tongue lizards at this time of the year). It requires concentration, it requires focus. Tricky when you're laughing so hard you're crying.
QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING does a particularly good line in funny - provided gross, grotty and silly are things you find funny. Hearing the more grotesque, grotty and silly things in this book being read out by David Tennant made it even funnier.
If possible I'd forgotten how much I love Christopher Brookmyre's books. I am alternating backwards and forwards between these and the Discworld novels. I might have to start driving more.
Quite Ugly One Morning
Quite Ugly One Morning is the book that made Christopher Brookmyre a star in his native Britain, establishing his distinctive, scabrously humorous style and breakneck, hell-for-leather narrative pacing. The novel that won the inaugural First Blood Award for the best debut crime novel in the United Kingdom is now available in America for the first time, and comic crime writing on this side of the Atlantic may never be the same.
Quite Ugly One Morning introduces Brookmyre's signature protagonist, the hard-partying, wisecracking investigative journalist Jack Parlabane, who is not afraid to bend the laws of the land (or even the laws of gravity) to get to the truth. Parlabane is nursing a horrific hangover when he stumbles across the corpse of the scion of a wealthy Edinburgh medical family. Determined to get to the bottom of the murder himself, he quickly becomes enmeshed in a wild adventure that will take him through all the strata of Edinburgh society and into some dangerous (and hysterical) situations.
Laced with acerbic wit and crackling dialogue, Quite Ugly One Morning is a wickedly entertaining and vivacious thriller.
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