Journey’s blend

After a slow start, Chris Brookmyre’s new thriller blossoms into a compelling page-turner.

Spark, a former special effects make-up artist on those selfsame 1990s horror movies, who has just been released from prison after serving a 24-year sentence for the murder of her lover Marcus. Millicent woke up, one morning in the mid-1990s, to find Marcus’s bloody body beside her in bed; and now that she is free, she feels an increasing need to uncover the truth about a murder she is certain she did not commit.

What follows – once Brookmyre gets his story going – is a highly engaging road-movie of a narrative about how this unlikely couple, having somehow clocked one another as kindred spirits, end up travelling together across western Europe in pursuit of survivors from the rogues’ gallery of characters with whom Millicent was working at the time of the murder, on a neverreleased Italian horror movie with a reputation for being cursed.

The story of their journey is intercut with flashback scenes set mainly aboard the yacht of the film’s producer, an inveterate wheeler-dealer called Lucio; and if the detailed twists and turns of the thriller plot are often baffling, the story’s glittering cast of stars and starlets, whores and artists, shady financial backers and dodgy politicians, is never less than intriguing.

The book’s problems lie mainly in its very slow and repetitive opening chapters, which need a few sharp strokes of the red pencil, and in its clunky and sometimes inelegant prose style; even though the narrative is in the third person, Brookmyre tends to write like a geek and