Jack Parlabane

Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning is the raucous comic thriller that established the author's reputation for a scabrously humorous style and breakneck, hell-for-leather narrative pacing. When hard-partying, wisecracking investigative journalist Jack Parlabane stumbles across the corpse of the scion of a wealthy Edinburgh medical family, he's determined to get to the bottom of things on his own. He quickly becomes enmeshed in a rousing adventure that will take him through all the strata of contemporary Scottish society – and into some dangerous (and hysterical) situations. Laced with acerbic wit and crackling dialogue, Quite Ugly One Morning is a wildly entertaining and vivacious thriller.

Just when left-leaning journalist Jack Parlabane trades in his muckraking career for domestic quietude, the muck comes calling. Conservative tabloid tycoon Roland Voss, his wife, and their two ineffectual bodyguards have been found at Voss's country estate with their throats slit. An arrest has been made, the media is pouncing, and Parlabane smells a fix. So does public defender Nicole Carrow. The pigeon is her former client, a harmless Robin Hood burglar now accused of breaking parole most spectacularly. But this is no simple frame-up. It's more of a high-end conspiracy. Parlabane and Carrow are determined to do right-even as so many things are about to go wrong.

Celebrated, beautiful, and talented, rock star Heike Gunn has everything. Then, following a sell-out tour in Germany, the superstar vanishes. So have a lot of things in the life of Scottish investigating reporter Jack Parlabane: his career, his marriage, and his reputation after he ended up on the wrong end of a scandal. But when he gets a call for help from the manager of Heike's band, Parlabane sees a shot at redemption. As Parlabane enters the backstage world of a group at the breaking point, he discovers each member is hiding something. Paranoia, jealousy, fear, guilt, and obsession are getting the best of them. It got to Heike, too. But in pursuing her reckless past-from Milan to the Scottish islands-Parlabane is being followed by his own dark history. As secrets collide, he'd better find Heike fast before it's too late... for both of them.

From Scottish crime master Christopher Brookmyre, "Black Widow" tells the potent story of a woman who thought she was too late for love, the man who falls for her ambition, and the secret selves that are poised, at any moment, to end everything. Diana Jager is clever, strong, and successful, a skilled surgeon and fierce campaigner via her blog about sexism in medicine. Yet it takes only hours for her life to crumble when her personal details are released on the internet as revenge for her writing. Then she meets Peter. He is kind, generous, and knows nothing about her past - the second chance she's been waiting for. Within six months, they are married. Within six more, Peter is dead in a road accident, a nightmare end to their fairy-tale romance. But Peter's sister Lucy doesn't believe in fairy tales, and tasks rogue reporter Jack Parlabane with discovering the dark truth behind the woman the media is calling the Black Widow. Still on the mend from a turbulent divorce, Jack's investigation into matters of the heart takes him to hidden places no one should ever have to go.

It is one of the cardinal rules of hacking, and not since Lisbeth Salander famously violated it in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series has the maxim been so compellingly broken as in "The Last Hack," the new Jack Parlabane thriller from one of the smartest minds in crime fiction, Christopher Brookmyre. Sam Morpeth has had to grow up way too fast. Left to fend for a younger sister with learning difficulties when their mother goes to prison, she is forced to watch her dreams of university evaporate. But Sam learns what it is to be truly powerless when a stranger begins to blackmail her online. Meanwhile, reporter Jack Parlabane seems to have finally gotten his career back on track with a job at a flashy online news start-up, but his success has left him indebted to a volatile source on the wrong side of the law. Now that debt is being called in, and it could cost him everything. Thrown together by a common enemy, Sam and Jack are about to discover they have more in common than they realize-and might be each other's only hope.