This was a book group choice. I’ll be concise.

1) It has so many characters that I got confused.

2) I found it very difficult to believe that a woman who spent 30 years working for the police would buy a child.

3) I didn’t like the rambling thoughts of characters in this book. It was difficult to glean what was relevant. I didn’t feel like I connected to any of the characters and got fed up of Jackson going on and on about his dead sister. He’s done it throughout the series and it’s getting boring.

In its defence, it’s fairly ‘readable’, just disappointing as I liked the first Jackson Brodie novel (Case Histories).

A crazy book. Just when you think things can’t get any more insane, they do. I raced through it while sunbathing in Cyprus. It was a perfect holiday read: easy, very original and ultimately uplifting.

Interesting to read points of view of different old people. Humourous in parts with a slightly farcical ending.

I didn’t think I was enjoying this book as I was reading it but it turned out that I galloped through it at quite a pace. It’s good, dramatic and tender and has a real sense of the time it was set in – the 40’s. The parts are in reverse chronological order which allow the story to unfold in an interesting way. It makes for compulsive reading as blanks are filled in all the way to the end. There are lots of characters; I had to make a list to help me remember as read.

I applied Sarah’s Rule and read 100 pages of this. There is a very funny bit: Renton and his colleagues have a regular competition to see who can do the biggest poos (on newspaper, for measuring). This time their boss is on his way to the toilet so they have to ‘pick up the papers, open the windaes and fling oor bombs oantae the flat roof’ before the boss catches them.

But there isn’t anything noteworthy about the rest. I’ve read 105 pages – the whole first part – and there isn’t anything pushing me to read on. The stuff that is good has been done before; if I’d never met Begbie in Trainspotting I might have found him more amusing/shocking, but I have already met him before. I first read Trainspotting when I was about 18 and I was totally blown away by it. I remember enjoying it just as much the second time I read it but, on reading it again some years later, I’d had enough of it. Perhaps that’s why I’m not interested enough in Skagboys.

Like Noughts and Crosses, this is a real page-turner. There’s a lot more hate and less love in this one though. There are more good observations of how black/white people are represented in the media, treated by police etc. It’s written in the same style: very simple, almost like a script. The ending is a cliffhanger but, because I’ve read the third book’s blurb I know what the outcome is. I agree with a book reviewer who condemned it as a lazy ending; I would have preferred a decisive and devastating ending like that of Noughts and Crosses. Still, this is a complusive read and I can’t wait read to the next one.

I read this book for my library book club. It’s a beautifully written and extremely perceptive book. While it isn’t a comfortable read – I found it a bit incestuous in parts – it is throughly engaging and reminded me of The Sense of an Ending because it is a gorgeously crafted tale leading to a shocking climax. I would recommend it.