One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

Take one high-school reunion being held on a floating oil rig in the process of being converted to a vacation resort, and hosted by a classmate that no one seems to remember. Add a poorly coordinated group of mercenaries being paid to assault said oil rig, some of whom are former terrorists -- from opposing sides. And include the (involuntary) participation of a just-retired police detective who can't seem to avoid running into evidence of Very Bad Things happening in the neighborhood and offshore.

And the dark humor is great... from the first paragraph when I read about "liquidised mercenary raining splashily down" on Connor, and thought to myself, Huh? Is that what I think I just read? Yup. "He reached up reluctantly and wiped the gore from his eyelids..." Not for the squeamish. But if you can appreciate black humor, this book will have you laughing in your chair.

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, by Christopher Brookmyre
Author Christopher Brookmyre's Web site - look under Books for the first three chapters online!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A "Pope of the Living Dead" Moment

Image
Yesterday morning I picked up the newspaper outside my door and saw this: Woah, hold onto your brains! Zombie Crisis in the Vatican! Anyway, after I took it out of the wrapper, the full picture emerged. Don't things like this make you wonder if the people doing front-page layout are awake, asleep, or trying to make us spit our coffee all over the paper?
Read more

What future? I don't even wear a watch.

I just finished reading The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around . This one is for a class, so it's outside the range of my usual reading list. Basically it's a manifesto on how computers could be made easier to use by making them more "human-centric" -- fitting the computer system to the way people need to use them, instead of forcing people to learn how to work to fit the computer. The author, Michael Dertouzos, was head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, so his examples are filled with his own actual experiences using (guinea pigging?) experimental computer applications developed by colleagues. There's a flight-reservation system that operates on speech recognition technology instead of keyboard input, and a "meaning processor" that attempts to spider information as you use it and tag meaning on your behalf to create an ever-expanding index. The ideas are interesting, but they
Read more