The Cut: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick

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The main character is a lady in her seventies, recently released from prison after serving twenty five years for a murder she is adamant she did not commit. She teams up with a late teens student and they go on a road trip through France and Italy trying to make sense of the past, and maybe understand why someone is trying to kill them. Its a decent if unremarkable read that tries a little to hard to impress and wrap everything up in a bow for the reader at the end. Novelist Christopher Brookmyre: My life in five games". BBC News. 14 July 2014 . Retrieved 14 July 2014. It had sounded good when she said it. But now anyone could see his place wasn’t here. And one of those people was him. Although still maintaining her innocence, Millie has long given up on finding out what really happened and is going full steam ahead with her suicide plans.

It’s a detailed, brilliant read, and it takes a while to warm up to Millicent but by the end of this whirlwind ride, you’re cheering for her and Jerry and amazed by how the plot unfolds. Overall, I’d say that it’s not bad, but it’s not great; it’s a decent brain-off read, especially if you’re a big movie fan. The chapters follow Jerry and Millicent's stories. Some are in current time and some relate to earlier periods in their lives. In the case of Millicent she tends to be known as Millie in her pre prison life. However when we meet Jerry he is a new student who is not really getting on with his fellow students. He used to be something of a burglar and is still light fingered. Millicent is living with two other older ladies and is clearly rather agoraphobic. She is considering suicide. This is not really giving anything much away as this is all revealed within the first 3/4 chapters.

The story about Millie’s past takes in a political element, recalling the ‘video nasties’ moral panic of the 80s and 90s and featuring a Murdoch-type family, whose story is interwoven with Millie’s both on a cultural and a personal level. It is also chastening to learn that for Jerry, the Leveson Inquiry is a historical event, something he has only learnt about at university, rather than a recent memory! Jasmine soon uncovers Tessa’s involvement in a drug-riddled Highlands estate retreat replete with occult rituals, which implicates more than a few people in the upper echelons of Scotland’s arts scene. Tessa’s disappearance in the summer of 1981 begins to look increasingly like murder, but the guilty will stop at nothing to keep the truth hidden.

Bedlam was released in 2013. The book has been turned into a video game, also written by Brookmyre. [8] Ambrose Parry [ edit ] Twenty-five years later, her sentence for murder served, Millicent is ready to give up on her broken life – until she meets troubled film student and reluctant petty thief Jerry. Chris Brookmyre likes to mix it up – while he excels at crime, from his brilliant early novels to his recent thrillers, all with different, meticulously researched themes, he also writes historical novels with his wife and does a side turn in space for some SF books with our fellow imprint Orbit. The Cut has echoes of his earlier work, with the assured style of where he is now. He pulls no punches, but don’t be put off by the horror-movie theme in this; I am firmly against the entire genre (sorry) but loved the way it plays into the story here: Millicent, the main protagonist, has had an amazing past of being a horror make-up artist, which leads to her being on set of a notorious film and ending up twenty-five years later just getting out of prison. Jerry, a film student and Millicent’s lodger, is thrown rather violently into her world and helps to turn her self-destructive streak into a quest for justice as they are forced to go on the run in international manner.year old Millicent Spark, a former make-up artist on horror films, has just been released from prison, after serving a 25 year sentence for allegedly murdering her boyfriend; a crime for which she maintains her innocence. Unable to exonerate herself and finding her new “freedom” less than appealing, Millicent is contemplating suicide until she forms an unusual alliance her new flatmate, Jerry Kelly, a talented but disaffected film student. Together, they discover information that could prove Millicent’s innocence, but also puts them both in mortal danger.

I think the thing I like most about the book is the characters of Jerry and Millicent. When they first meet it’s a highly entertaining game of verbal tennis with Millicent’s hapless jobsworth social worker rushing to get the lobs. There is much good dark humour between them. It takes a while to get into the story but after the chance discovery the mystery deepens and becomes more intriguing and you have many questions about where it all starts to go wrong for Millicent. It appears to link to the making of an unreleased and violent film called ‘Mancipium’ in 1993. The story of the making of the film is very dark and unsavoury, think Weinstein and you get the picture. There are some interesting reflections on the impact of video nasties on key court cases at this time which is thought provoking. There are some good sections where there is fear, some jaw dropping discoveries and it gets twisty and twistier with some excitement such as that which Hollywood may produce. The end is clever and unexpected as we’ve been led up some blind alleys. Jenny Dalziel is an Edinburgh CID officer, part of Hector McGregor's team as a DC in Quite Ugly One Morning, who becomes a close friend of Parlabane and appears or is referenced in most of his books. She is openly gay and in a relationship with a woman called Maggie who has survived breast cancer by the time of Dead Girl Walking. What else can I say without giving away major spoilers? The author’s early training in investigative journalism is still serving him well in doing a thorough research and in making the power-play connections between crime and corporate interests. ( ‘You really need to catch up with modern politics, Millicent.’ ) . Between the lines, or in plain textual reference, you can catch digs at the current British Prime-Minister and the post-truth era in politics, the role of the press in promoting conspiracy theories.

The Cut is set around films and horror ones particularly. It has two narrators. Jerry, young, and a rather light fingered student of film. Millicent, far older, and was a make-up artist on 80s horror films; she was accused of murdering her boyfriend and served a long sentence for the crime. As I write this I'm thinking that this does not sound like my sort of book. I'm not a "film" person and dislike horror particularly. However these rather off the wall ingredients made for a decent read in my mind. When the house group are out for a meal at a hotel, Millie goes missing and Jerry goes to look for her. He finds her wandering the corridors of the hotel and there they stumble across a clue that may lead to her finally proving her innocence all these years later. As the two find themselves in immediate danger they are forced to flee the country and travel around Europe to both look into Millies past and also avoid becoming victims themselves of whatever crime is being covered up. Meanwhile, Detective Superintendent and mother-of-two Catherine McLeod is called to the scene of a murder in the Highlands. Following a theatrical outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Cragruthes Castle, a prominent figure in the Scottish arts community is shot dead during a post-performance photo call. With her initial leads turning out to be red herrings, McLeod struggles to determine the killer’s motive. Stories is an anthology of short stories, written on themes of community and hope, by a mix of the UK’s best established writers and previously unpublished authors, whose pieces were chosen by Kathy Burke from over 250 entries. Brookmyre has always had the desire to take the reality of the type of people he knows and place them in a high concept setting: “Growing up, I related to things like Billy Connolly and anything that seemed authentically of the world that I knew, but also to the escapism of grand-scale American movies,” he says.