Christopher Brookmyre: The Sacred Art of Stealing

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

Christopher Brookmyre is rapidly acquiring a following among those who have a taste for fast-paced, smart, satirical thrillers, and The Sacred Art of Stealing will not disappoint them.

The book begins with a bang - of sorts - with a hard-bitten hitman extolling the virtues of the retail blowjob in a prologue set in his sleazy Mexican hotel room.

From there, the action shifts north and across the Atlantic. Angelique de Xavia is a diminutive Glaswegian cop, of African extraction, who is living with and living down the aftermath of a counter-terrorist action which we understand she performed practically solo a little time ago. We don't learn the details, but significant levels both of heroism and carnage are alluded to.

The force, though, is slow to give credit, and Angelique is pretty jaded with it all by the time she is called upon to go into a bank in which an unorthodox band of robbers is holding hostages.

It is no ordinary heist. The robbers are (for the most part) polite and gentle with their captives, even laying on entertainment in the form of an artistic caption competition and a performance of Beckett's Waiting For Godot.

Leading the crew is Zal, a crim with class if ever there was one - the son of a magician who is capable of pulling off a few tricks of his own, and a failed artist. When Angelique is forced to pit her wits against him, she finds herself in danger of losing her professionalism.

Nor, it seems, is he immune to her charms. When he makes contact after the bank job is over, she becomes entangled in the high-stakes revenge game he is playing.

The plot is The Sacred Art of Stealing's strong point: it keeps a couple of steps ahead of the reader at all times, and the romantic tension between Angelique and Zal is heightened by the suspicion that he may be using her merely as one of the pawns in his elaborate chess game.

The characterisation is good, too: Angelique is an interesting lead, even if Zal is a little larger than life.

The problem, which those who are willing to be swept up in the plot will find easy to ignore, are patches of over-writing. Brookmyre does a great line in snappy, slangy dialogue, but when he must carry things forward with narration, you can sense his impatience. It's as though he can't wait to get all that tedious writing out of the way so he can bank the cheque for the film rights.

For it's hard to ignore the cinematic parallels as you read: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is an immediate comparison; so, too, is Heat. But for all that, it'll be a good film; as a book it's not half bad.

Penguin

$34.95