Product Description

It's no ordinary summer for DCC Bob Skinner, as murder mystery leaps from the page into reality in the new book in Quintin Jardine’s outstanding police series.

August in Edinburgh: As Skinner stands on the edge of a career-defining moment and his fiancée, Scotland's First Minister Aileen de Marco faces a political crisis, a famous figure from another field is found dead. As the mystery deepens, Skinner finds himself crossing swords with an old enemy from the past, while his investigating detectives are faced with the unwelcome complication of a duke’s junkie daughter. Meanwhile a second Scottish celebrity dies violently in Australia. It seems impossible, but could the two be connected? As DCS Mario McGuire heads to Melbourne to investigate, back in Scotland his boss’s big moment is compromised in the most dramatic and unexpected manner, as a famous friendship is shattered for ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209934 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

About the Author
Quintin Jardine gave up the life of a political spin doctor for the more morally acceptable world of murder and mayhem. Happily married, he hides from critics and creditors in secret locations in Scotland and Spain.

Customer Reviews

A low point for a usually enjoyable series
I've read the entire series - not proud of it but we all have our guilty pastimes. This is, by my lights, the most self-indulgent of the lot and one where Jardine's weaknesses overwhelm his strengths. You'll find the sudden, inexplicable (but for plot movement) changes of behaviour that his characters are prone to, the unguessable (because the author won't show you all the cards) denouement, Skinner solving it all with a "Hmmm" and a long stare into the distance... all the hallmarks of a Jardine mystery. Those are the good bits. The bad, in my view, are the over-indulgence in horribly clumsy puns, clanking meta-textual excursions, and Jardine's belief that rim-shot-accompanied, blatantly telegraphed authorial excursions will be read as light comic touches. I'll buy the next one - they don't call it a bad habit for nothing - but I do hope he sticks more firmly to action, melodrama and his well-conceived version of the real Edinburgh in future.

Fully up to standard
I thoroughly enjoyed this, although I think you get most out of it if you've read the previous books, as many old friends appear. Loved the Edinburgh Book Festival setting (I go every year, to at least 25 events). Bob Skinner is as splendidly unlikeable as ever - egotistical and pompous. Well plotted, with all the skeins satisfactorily tied up at the end.

Banal drivel from start to finish
A barely-credible plot, with implausible coincidences and connections; a pointless and irrelevant sub-plot involving his daughter and former best mate, and quite the most "convenient" promotion to high office.

Jardine still persists in using this awful device of having the characters speak to the reader instead of to each other. So much of the dialogue involves one character telling another things that he already knows, as a way of reminding the reader what happened in previous narratives.

This is quite the worst Skinner novel yet.