I felt immediately immersed in the story and found myself thinking about it several times during the day. The best? The author is great at generating empathy towards the characters and the atmosphere is spot on. This is the kind of crime fiction I love.

If I was the Edinburgh Tourist Board, I would pay Doug Johnstone a retainer never to write about Edinburgh again. Tyler and his family do not live in the Edinburgh that tourists want to know about. They live in Niddrie, in what is described as “an area of social deprivation”. Tyler’s mother, Angela, is addicted to heroin and frequently overdoses. Tyler’s half-brother, Barry, is a psychotic, who earns his living by housebreaking, coercing his sister, Kelly and Tyler into helping him. Tyler is trying to bring his sister, Bean, up safely in the midst of all this chaos. Tyler is a good brother. He cooks and cleans, delivers his sister to school where she is known by her real name, Bethany. Then, one night, Barry decides that they are going out on the rob again and he decides on a house which looks like rich pickings. It is the house of one of Edinburgh’s gangland bosses. That is when the disaster begins, which plays out with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In the midst of all this Tyler meets Flick, a very posh Edinburgh girl with problems of her own, and she gets caught up in the events following the housebreaking. The only other thing I will say about the plot is that it ends with more corpses than Hamlet. This is not the Edinburgh that the tourists see, when they come to the Festival in August. This is not the Edinburgh of the Old Town with its castle, and the New Town with its Georgian squares. It is an Edinburgh that Rebus would be familiar with, but it is much darker, much more vicious than that. This is a carefully crafted story. You will want Tyler and Flick and Bean to survive, but you will not have any idea about how they are going to do this, or even if they are going to survive. You will even want Angela to pull through and it is hard to have any sympathy for her. There is also an endearing part of the story where Bean discovers a mongrel and her three puppies, and you will certainly want that to go well. Doug Johnstone is a master storyteller, and has been so since his very first book. But this is not a tale for the gentle-hearted. Some people will find the language alone to be offensive, especially the use of particular words. Nor will they accept that this is quite normal speech for the Central Belt of Scotland. Doug Johnstone does not flinch from using such language as a necessary part of the tale, making them true to the place that they come from. So, if you object this is not the book for you. You will not be able to blot the language out. If, on the other hand, you want to read a story about the lower depths of Scottish society and how they live, you can learn a great deal from this book. And it is a very good story.

A salutary story of being born on the wrong side of the tracks. This is Edinburgh with its classy New Town, its bourgeois houses, but this is also the city with a struggling underclass, and in parts of the city, there are young souls sucked into the swamp of violence and depravity. The city hides its underprivileged well…. The Wallace family, headed by mum Angela (she is in fact only the nominal head as she spends most of her time passed out taking heroin and under the influence of alcohol) is living in the last 2 standing but derelict tower blocks in Niddrie. Barry, the oldest son in this dysfunctional family unit is a nutter and criminal, shacked up with his sister Kelly, and a particular bully to younger half brother Tyler. This is Tyler’s story as he straddles the demands of his birth family, looking after tiny sister Bean (Bethany), trying to keep his head above water as Barry exerts his nasty, manipulative control over the individuals in his family. Tyler is coerced into criminal activity by Barry and largely acquiesces to protect little Bean. He does his best by her. One evening they break and enter a house and end up stabbing a woman. She is the wife of Edinburgh’s biggest crime lord (I would have thought a crime lord would have state-of-the-art protection and surveillance to scupper any random intruders?). The Wallace family is now clearly truly doomed. Tyler is beside himself that things have got this far. He can see the writing on the wall. It is just happenstance that he comes across Flick from Loretto (one of the posh schools in Edinburgh) where she has been parked by her parents who are busy flitting around the world working in armaments and protection. The two, from very different social classes, have both lacked the nurturing care of parents and thus find a mutually supportive bond. The author has a lovely linear way of writing, he moves effortlessly from one scene to the next. It’s quite cinematic. The thrum of the Wallace’s Skoda (a Skoda blends in well, apparently), as it patrols the well healed streets looking for new targets, forms the backing track… imagine the theme tune to The Sopranos and you have the feel of the wheels turning; the author’s words purr, broken by the sound of breaking glass as yet another burglary is underway. It is a poignant story. Edinburgh gets a good look in and if you know the city, you will find plenty of familiar places to get you in the mood for literary wanderlust.

Set in Edinburgh, 17 year old Tyler lives a life of deprivation and poverty. Tyler is not a bad boy and tries his best to care for his little sister who he loves and his drug addict mother. Tyler is forced into robbing the homes of rich people in Edinburgh by his two older siblings. Barry his older brother is a bully and a violent thug and when a robbery goes wrong and Barry stabs a woman, Tyler cannot believe what has happened. Barry has picked the wrong family to mess with as the home they were robbing belongs to Edinburgh's biggest Crime Lord who is now seeking retribution. This novel was a real page turner which held my attention until the end. Doug Johnstone is an author who writes a good descriptive story with a well executed plot. Gritty, down to earth and absorbing. A great read I would recommend.