Sign in with Facebook
Rowena Hoseason's Reviews > Random
Random (Narey & Winter, #1)
by
by
This is a tightly-woven thriller which escapes the usual humdrum feeling of Brit crime lit. At first it appears to be a fairly standard 'serial killer does bad stuff' with some ingenious methods for his murders. But then the plot opens out and the killer becomes a rather more sympathetic character, as he gets unwillingly involved in the Glaswegian underworld.
Initially I was a little concerned about the 'hoots mon' aspects of the text; I have found some books which contain big chunks of local dialect to be a bore or occasionally indecipherable. But that really wasn't the case with 'Random'; instead the author constructed an authentic-sounding narrative, sprinkled with the gallus grey, hard-faced nature of the city in all its bleakness. There are some thoroughly gripping sections -- like when the killer takes a real dislike to one of his intended victims, an unfortunate supermarket checkout woman. You can feel the bile in his throat with each bitter description as he becomes more and more angry with her -- and, we suspect, with himself...
The descriptions of low lives, drunkards, yuppie boozers in the wine bar and so on are very entertaining. There's a couple of very tense scenes where the protagonist's future hangs from a thread, and a very neat finale. We don't see very much of the Police investigators, or indeed any of the supporting characters: the novel is focused entirely on the killer himself. That means we have to endure the literary device of newspaper cuttings to fill in the blanks (not my favourite style, but it worked OK).
Overall this is a well-paced, intelligent and easy to read thriller. The concepts aren't very new, but it's delivered with panache and I enjoyed reading it. (With one proviso: the author keeps using the word 'that' when he should be using 'who' and I know it's a tiny whinge but it starts to irritate after a while).
I'll certainly look for Craig Robertson's next book on the strength of this one.
If you like this kind of gritty thriller then you may also enjoy A Last Act of Charity by Frank Westworth. I'm a tiny bit biased about it (reader: I married the author...) but figure that it'll appeal to readers with similarly weird interests...
7/10
Initially I was a little concerned about the 'hoots mon' aspects of the text; I have found some books which contain big chunks of local dialect to be a bore or occasionally indecipherable. But that really wasn't the case with 'Random'; instead the author constructed an authentic-sounding narrative, sprinkled with the gallus grey, hard-faced nature of the city in all its bleakness. There are some thoroughly gripping sections -- like when the killer takes a real dislike to one of his intended victims, an unfortunate supermarket checkout woman. You can feel the bile in his throat with each bitter description as he becomes more and more angry with her -- and, we suspect, with himself...
The descriptions of low lives, drunkards, yuppie boozers in the wine bar and so on are very entertaining. There's a couple of very tense scenes where the protagonist's future hangs from a thread, and a very neat finale. We don't see very much of the Police investigators, or indeed any of the supporting characters: the novel is focused entirely on the killer himself. That means we have to endure the literary device of newspaper cuttings to fill in the blanks (not my favourite style, but it worked OK).
Overall this is a well-paced, intelligent and easy to read thriller. The concepts aren't very new, but it's delivered with panache and I enjoyed reading it. (With one proviso: the author keeps using the word 'that' when he should be using 'who' and I know it's a tiny whinge but it starts to irritate after a while).
I'll certainly look for Craig Robertson's next book on the strength of this one.
If you like this kind of gritty thriller then you may also enjoy A Last Act of Charity by Frank Westworth. I'm a tiny bit biased about it (reader: I married the author...) but figure that it'll appeal to readers with similarly weird interests...
7/10
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Random.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
October 31, 2014
– Shelved
