I love crime fiction. As long as it’s not too gory that is. The last two crime novels I read were by Scottish writer Chris Brookmyre: Black Widow and Want You Gone. Both are excellent and very clever. Similarly to the techie romance of Happiness for Humans, these Brookmyres novels could be described as techie crime novels.
Black Widow is about a surgeon and blogger whose husband dies in a road accident and she ends up as prime suspect. The story has more twists and turns than Lombard Street and a true WTF ending. I do not want to give anything away so I will not describe the plot any further but I urge you to read this book. It is fab, as acknowledged by being awared McIlvanny Prize 2016 Crime Novel of the Year. My favourite quotes from Black Widow are:
- “Amazing how bullshit circular logic seems like mystic truth when you are blinded by love” (Yes! What a brillant sentence!)
- “It is possible to commit no error and still fail […]. That is not a flaw, just life.”
Want You Gone is about a young girl who is left to look after her younger sister when her mother is sent to prison. Things start to go wrong, when a stranger begins to blackmail her. If you want to learn about social engineering and cyber crime, this book will show you how it’s done. In Black Widow, the story took a number of very unexpected turn. In Want You Gone you will be wondering how the protagonists are going to get themsleves out of the mess that has been building up. My favourite quotes from Want You Gone are:
- “There’s nothing like getting exactly what you want to make you realise that what you thought you were missing isn’t the problem.”
- “I’ve learned my lesson about the law of unitended consequences.”
The Omnivorous Reader 