Jack Parlabane

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.

There are no women on the Internet-it is one of the cardinal rules of hacking, and not since Lisbeth Salander famously violated it in Stieg Larsson's Millenium 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.