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Black Widow
On sale
28th January 2016
Price: £9.99
Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, 2017
‘A celtic Gone Girl… guaranteed to keep you guessing’ — IAN RANKIN
*****WINNER Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year*****
*****WINNER Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize for Crime Novel of the Year*****
Did she do it? Did he deserve it?
Diana Jager is clever, strong and successful, a skilled surgeon and fierce campaigner via her blog about sexism. 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’s 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 fairytale romance.
But Peter’s sister Lucy doesn’t believe in fairytales, and tasks maverick reporter Jack Parlabane with discovering the dark truth behind the woman the media is calling Black Widow…
‘Black Widow is a stand-out thriller’
Renee Knight, author of Disclaimer
*****WINNER Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year*****
*****WINNER Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize for Crime Novel of the Year*****
Did she do it? Did he deserve it?
Diana Jager is clever, strong and successful, a skilled surgeon and fierce campaigner via her blog about sexism. 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’s 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 fairytale romance.
But Peter’s sister Lucy doesn’t believe in fairytales, and tasks maverick reporter Jack Parlabane with discovering the dark truth behind the woman the media is calling Black Widow…
‘Black Widow is a stand-out thriller’
Renee Knight, author of Disclaimer
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Reviews
A biting satire, nuanced enough to avoid polemic
A celtic Gone Girl... guaranteed to keep you guessing
A gripping, complex and classy crime novel.
It's only as you're racing through the final tense pages, full of betrayal, revenge and shocking revelations, that you realise the brilliance behind the construction of this utterly compulsive, whipsmart thriller
The story's characters are compelling and the mystery is evoked with scalpel-like precision
This is mystery plotting at its highest level, all the disparate strands forming into a web and then into a knot that tightens around victim, detective and reader
Black Widow does its best to evade you at every turn, demanding your full attention
Black Widow is a stand-out thriller, reminiscent of the best of Nordic Noir but with its own vivid landscape
Brookmyre opens with a dramatic court scene, followed by a series of clever twists that challenge the reader to work out who is the victim of an extremely sophisticated crime
A briskly paced thriller with a sense of confident contemporary relevance
Chilling, gripping and exquisitely unpredictable
It's a tour de force. It's such an important book, with fantastic characters - a really strong novel ... It keeps us guessing not just who did it, but why they did it, and cements Chris's place in the pantheon of great crime writers.
Enthralling and entertaining
Exceptionally good - a knotty mystery that's not just richly, provocatively political but one of the most perceptive excavations of a dysfunctional marriage I can remember reading.... Brookmyre plays a cunning, careful game
Chris Brookmyre does an exceptionally good job . . . making sense of a narrative in which truth and lies are inextricably entwined. The more I read, the more I was hooked
Chris Brookmyre has some claim to be the leading satirical novelist currently at work in Britain
I didn't know what was going to happen next in this epic thriller. I urge you to read it, too
