Product Description

Terrifying serial killer thriller set in the gritty Glasgow of the near future, from the bestselling author of the Logan McRae series. Glasgow, not too far in the future. A new punishment has been devised for the perpetrators of serious crimes -- one that not only reduces the prison population but also benefits society at large. The process is known as halfheading: the offender's lower jaw is removed and they are lobotomized. They are then put to work as cleaners in municipal areas like hospitals, where they serve as a warning to all that crime doesn't pay. But for one halfhead, it seems the lobotomy hasn't quite succeeded. Six years after her surgery, Dr Fiona Westfield 'wakes up' surrounded by the butchered remains of a man she has just brutally killed. As her mind slowly begins to return, she sets out on a quest for vengeance. William Hunter, Assistant Section Director of the 'Network' -- a military wing of the police -- attends the crime scene left behind by the newly awakened halfhead. Sherman House is a run-down concrete housing development full of undesirables and Hunter and his team quickly find themselves in a firefight with the locals. With the help of old comrades and a new friend in the form of prickly but attractive Detective Sergeant Josephine Cameron, Will gets on the trail of the killer. But before long the investigation leads back to a terrible tragedy in his own past, as well as to a terrifying conspiracy to sow violence and misery among Glasgow's most vulnerable citizens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2173 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
`Slick, gruesome and brutally intelligent, this is bare knuckles thriller-writing.' --Michael Marshall

From the Author
1. This is your first novel not to be set in the present - what inspired you to move to the future?

It’s actually the other way around: I wrote Halfhead long before I’d even thought of doing crime novels set in the here and now. So in a lot of ways, it’s the Logan books that are the big departure from what I was doing. Which meant I had to go back and give Halfhead a thorough going over with wire brush and Detol this year to make sure it was up to scratch. One of the great things about writing a thriller set in the near future is that you get to take current themes and trends, twist them through ninety degrees, then force them to their logical (or illogical) conclusion. You can have gunships, and onomatopoeic weapons, and huge explosions, and the kind of government conspiracies you just can’t do in the here and now. It’s a vast playground for the overactive imagination, which is why I loved it.

2. Why did you choose to set halfhead in Glasgow as opposed to the setting of many of your previous novels, Aberdeen?

Sometime a story just seems to fit a location, and Glasgow was the perfect place to create this big semi-dystopian world where Scotland is a world power, and a lot of the UK has disappeared beneath the rising sea levels. Plus it’s nice to have a bit of fun in a different city for a change.

3. Where did the idea of ‘halfheading’ people as a solution to crime come from?

I’d been watching a documentary on the American penal system, focussing on the impact the death penalty had on violent crime. Which appears to be absolutely none. It also went into the amount of fan mail and love letters prisoners receive on death row – seemingly normal people writing these gushing letters to convicted murders, rapists, and serial killers. That just seems utterly bizarre to me. So I thought: well, capital punishment clearly doesn’t work, and corporal doesn’t seem to either … what could a justice system do to make sure people who commit violent crime can never be seen as martyrs or sex objects. Clearly you’d need them to be instantly identifiable as criminals, something that no one is ever going to aspire to, and you’d want them to fulfil a useful, but thoroughly unglamorous role in society. And that’s where the idea of halfheads came from.

4. The book is full of some truly loathsome villains - are you ever inspired by real life criminals?

I did a whole heap of research into serial killers for Halfhead, and spent a lot of time going through several of the FBI’s training manuals. They contain some truly horrific case studies, not just serial offenders, but also the kind of casual violence people are prepared to commit in order to get what they want. It was an unpleasant reminder that there’s very little we can do in fiction that hasn’t already been done in real life. And probably a lot worse. The really worrying stuff came from a book I found on ‘death row’ in my local library: 50p or it was going to be pulped. It was about the medical experiments and weapons research the Japanese military carried out during the Second World War on their own citizens. It was all the more horrific because it was state sanctioned and sponsored. Appalling brutality carried out as scientific experiments. But everything in the book is completely fictional, as far as I know…

5. The book is shot through with lots of interesting ideas - VR sets, halfheading, Social Engineers - can you imagine any of these ever coming to pass?

Dear God, I hope not… Mind you, we’re not far off full immersion VR at the moment. The military is doing a lot of research that’s going to have huge implications for the public when they’re finally released, especially with advances in quantum computing to power it all. About the only thing we know about the future is that we’ll probably still be waiting for our rocket cars, butler robots, and personal jetpacks in a hundred years time. Tomorrow’s World has a lot to answer for.

About the Author
Stuart MacBride, without the 'B', is the bestselling author of a series of crime novels featuring DS Logan McRae and set in Aberdeen. He won the International Thriller Writers best debut novel award, and has been shortlisted for the Barry Award, and twice for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. In 2007 he won the Dagger in the Library, awarded for a body of work and in 2008 he won the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Breakthrough Author. Halfhead, published under the name Stuart B MacBride, is his first foray into Science Fiction. Stuart lives in north-east Scotland with his wife Fiona, cat Grendel, and a vegetable plot full of weeds.

Customer Reviews

Grisly Glasgow Goings-On
The Glasgow depicted in Mr MacBride's new novel 'Halfhead'
is not a Glasgow that its current citizens might wish to
consider too deeply. The future does not look bright at all.

In a time turned not too far forward (luxuries such as Irn-Bru and
Armani have not yet become past pleasures) bad things are afoot.
Very bad things indeed.

In a narrative which weaves the grisly exploits of a serial killer
of greater than usual depravity with the machinations of a dastardly
clandestine government-backed social experiment, Network Assistant
Section Director Mr Hunter becomes both hunter and hunted.

He is given a terribly bad time by his creator. That he survives
his trials at all is a credit to the highly evolved first aid and
surgical techniques which it seems we may all have the pleasure
of looking forward to.

Technology has gone mad. Cloned meat pizza toppings; cranial
video-game implants (for those who can afford them); holographic
adverts which pop up beside you unbidden should you dare to take
a stroll in the park (inadvisable!); weapons with the power to
do unthinkable (but darkly creative) things to flesh and bone
which raises the occasional question about the author's obvious
enjoyment of his own visceral technicolor imaginings.

The body-count is HUGE ! The pace of the story fast and furious.
The love interest is amusingly diverting. The conclusion gripping.

Both major and minor characters are well drawn.
Messrs Kikan and Peitai truly are as bad as baddies get; grubby
forensic pathologist George is a hoot as well as a big help;
DS Cameron makes the most of her internship in more ways than one
and Dr Fiona Westfield is as cruel and twisted a creation as you
are ever likely to meet again in a month of long, cold, dark nights.
(There are few things worse than a neuro-psychiatrist with a grudge!).

Not a novel for vegetarians or readers of a more nervous disposition
but a tale well-told which could conceivably find a future on the silver
screen should Mr MacBride find producers brave enough to back it.

Recommended.

Halfhead - sci-fi crime thriller
A gritty serial killer thriller set in set in the near future in Glasgow, where criminals are punished by effectively being lobotomised and having their lower jaw removed hence the term 'Halfhead'. They are then put to work as cleaners in hospitals, where they serve as a warning to all that crime doesn't pay. Six years after her surgery, one 'halfhead', Dr Fiona Westfield 'wakes up' surrounded by the butchered remains of a man she has just brutally killed. As her mind slowly begins to return, she sets out on a quest for vengeance.

This novel succesfully merges the two genres of science fiction and crime fiction. Stuart MacBride has created a successful crime fiction series prior to this novel and the style and humour of that series is ever present here. The novel is gritty, visceral and the influence of writers such as Philip K Dick and Michael Marshall Smith can also be seen here. Towards the end of the novel, it became more of an action thriller but overall, I would recommend this novel if you enjoy either crime fiction or science fiction or indeed both.

Fun but a little immature?
Stuart MacBride has previously had five Aberdonian police procedural novels published and done well from them. They tend to be a bit lurid, a bit gory and to require an element of suspension of disbelief. I understand that Halfhead was written before his previous books but had languished unpublished. One can see why: although Halfhead is eminently readable and shows enormous promise, it also betrays some immaturity.

Basically, Halfhead is a futuristic police procedural set in a Glasgow "not too far in the future". There are nods to the future that we expect: climate change; immense population growth; rising sea levels. There are the obligatory sci-fi changes for changes sake - people wear cloats; the polis become bluecoats; guns become whompers, zammers or thrummers. And the big technological changes seem to be the ability to work miracles with medical science, curing all manner or injuries in a quick and painless way - and the painless cures seem to offer enough hope to the injured to let them carry on with whatever they are doing without the inconvenience of writhing around in agony or losing consciousness. Except when the plot demands writhing agony or unconsciousness.

But despite all these sci-fi tricks, the basic premise of over-achieving policeman thwarted by his bureaucratic boss; warned off the case; and a no-hoper rookie partner are all familiar. There are immature tics - did we need all the Network staff to be named after famous cooks? - were all police staff really named after 20th century leaders of the Conservative Party? The amount of gore, too, feels somewhat immature, although I guess a teenage audience would lap it up. The setting in Glasgow, too, seems to be applied inconsistently. Sometimes people talk in broad Weegie accents and drink Irn Bru as they step over junkies in Kelvingrove Park, but at other times the setting seems like anywhere and the Glaswegian reference point evaporate.

Then we have the halfheading process itself. It sounds like a warped teenage fantasy - mutilating and de-sexing people, ostensibly as a punishment for heinous crimes that seem to vary from chapter to chapter. Some of MacBride's other works suggest a fascination with mutilation and Halfhead may display more of MacBride's inner thinking than he had intended.

But, for all that, as a thriller the novel is well paced, gripping and mercifully not dominated by its futuristic setting. The narrative sections following one particular halfhead are written in a rather accomplished, insistent and distinctive voice. The general narrative, too, has a mordant wit running through it. These touches help to lift Halfhead above other police procedurals. So this does demonstrate some real promise which was handsomely realized in Cold Granite and subsequent novels. I still wonder, though, whether publishing Halfhead will have done MacBride any favours in the long run.

A generous four stars for being fun, but perhaps with a total rewrite this could have been more.