All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye belongs to the half of Brookmyre's work less concerned with the state of the Scottish nation and more with what happens when iconically ordinary Scots are dumped into the middle of Hollywood plots. Here, we have, on the one hand, an international trouble-shooting organization most of whose agents are on the run from some sort of trouble themselves, and, on the other, a forty-something grandmother aware that life has passed her by and was not meant to. When someone tries to kidnap her grand-daughter, she responds with inventive viciousness; told to save her family by making a South of France rendezvous, she steals passports, cars and tickets as if she has always been doing it. Recruited merely as an expert on a missing boffin who happens to be her son, Jane demonstrates that the quiet desperation of ordinary life is the best training a super agent could have...This is Brookmyre at his most slyly subversive and viscerally exciting, a daydream which never quite becomes preposterous. --Roz Kaveney

'A sharp, memorable and occasionally surprisingly touching book'

'Memorably funny lines'

'Funny, electric and captivating'

As a teenager Jane Bell had dreamt of playing in the casinos of Monte Carlo in the company of James Bond, but in her punk phase she'd got herself pregnant and by the time she reaches forty-six she's a grandmother, her dreams as dry as the dust her Dyson sucks up from her hall carpet every day. Then her son Ross, a researcher working for an arms manufacturer in Switzerland, is forced to disappear before some characters cut from the same cloth as Blofeld persuade him to part with the secrets of his research. But they are not the only ones desperate to locate him. A team of security experts is hired by Ross's firm: headed by the enigmatic Bett, his staff have little in common apart from total professionalism and a thorough disregard for the law. Bett believes the key to Ross's whereabouts is his mother, and in one respect he is right, but even he is taken aback by the verve underlying her determination to secure her son's safety as she learns the black arts of quiet subterfuge and violent attack. The teenage dreams of fast cars, high-tech firepower and extreme action had always promised to be fun and games, but in real life it's likely someone is going to lose an eye ...Visit the author's website at www.

brookmyre.co.uk

2007-08-22 Silly, but fun

Very, very silly - but very good fun.

Don't try and get serious with the plot, you'll ruin it. Some of the best entertainment you can have with this book is casting the movie version. I still can't make my mind up who should play the heroine.