Publisher

Little, Brown & Co

Printer

Clays Ltd

Year Written/Published

1998

Country

Great Britain

ISBN

0 316 6444 47

Binding

Trade Paperback

Pages

388

Genre

Thriller

Blurb

Santa Monica, CA, 1999. There's nine months to go but already Sergeant Larry Freeman has had enough of the goddamn millennium – in a town that's never needed an excuse to get crazy, this latest strain of insanity is something he could seriously live without. Babysitting Hollywood's pondlife as LAPD liaison to the American Feature Film Market, he's less than delighted to discover that billionaire televangelist Luther St John is staging a 'Festival of Light' in protest – right across the street.

As if it's not enough to be playing referee between the film market's trash peddlers and the Festival's moral militants, Larry Freeman's also stuck with trying to figure out how four scientists vanished without trace from a research vessel 300 miles out in the pacific. And if he's got any time left over, he can always spend it wondering why the Reverend St John's cataclysmic predictions sound so worryingly confident.

Into this mounting chaos steps freelance photographer Steff Kennedy: jet-lagged, hungry and about to discover that his native Lanarkshire is not, after all, the global capital of religious stupidity.

Bullets. Bombs. Carnage. Slaughter. Depravity. Hysteria. Human Sacrifice. Mass destruction. Bad hair. It's not the end of the world, but you can certainly see it from here.

My Opinion

Brookmyre's first book was an instant hit with me, so I had high expectations for this one (his third). It didn't disappoint. The premise is shocking, but not implausible, and the action is summed up nicely by Steff, the angry Scot who ends up dragged right into the middle of it.

Each of the main characters is given depth and their own individuality, and each character explores their views of religion and beliefs, a process which I expected to be boring, but when combined with the urgency of the plot, is a strangely compelling break in the action.

This is not a religious book, by any means. In fact, it ridicules the idea of blind faith, and the conclusions that each character comes to is less of a religious epiphany and more of a resignation.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and look forward to finding more.

Date Finished

28/10/06

Rating

8/10