Parlabane approached by the sister of an old friend who now manages a rock band who’re starting to make it big. The lead singer has disappeared and she wants to find her without there being too much publicity. Narrative alternates between Parlabane’s PoV (third person) and first person (which turns out to be the blog of) band member Monica.

Read this straight after The Last Day of Christmas. Amazon reviews implied that this book wouldn’t make so much sense if you’d not read the first, but in fact I don’t think it helped particularly.

The same two narrators read this audiobook book as Last Day of Christmas. But although the male narrator has Parlabane’s PoV in both books, the "woman" characters are different, so that’s a bit odd.

I thought the plot device of having Monica’s blog telling half the story, while the other half eventually comes across the blog and works out that some of it was faked, was quite good. But I don’t think it was as effective as it could have been.

There were echoes of Espedair street, I think because you have a Scottish narrator talking about experiences in a popular rock band. But the story wasn’t anything like it.

Even more than LDOC, this really felt like toned-down Brookmyre. He’s cut down on the verbal diarrhoea but lost the sense of fun. I think he is aiming at a more mainstream style of writing - the story was almost plausible, compared to the over-the-top Bond-style plots he’s done before where you have private armies working for a mastermind terrorist who’s trying to blow up dams.

There were several annoyingly unbelievable descriptions of hacking - for example, Parlabane on one occasion was trying to get at data in a stolen iPad, but the owner had realised and had triggered a "kill" program. This deleted everything on the iPad, but did it slowly enough that Parlabane could see it happening, and could grab useful bits of files before the "kill" program reached them.

Epilogue is clunky teaser for more books where parlabane gets involved with this type of thing

Don’t think I’d bother reading this again.

Completed : 06-January-2016 (audiobook)