Complicity

Gonzo journalism meets Tartan Noir as Iain Banks ventures into crime. A journalist who’s a big fan of all the bad stuff seems to have a link to a killer picking off members of the establishment.

The second-person narration follows the killer, an unusual stylistic flourish. The answers to the horror lie within, and this book goes to some unbearably dark places. (In theory, The Crow Road is also a murder mystery.)

I love seeing rich, powerful, and corrupt figures get their just desserts, and this book delivers this in spades–very inventive spades.

Here, a gonzo journalist finds that important people he has been writing about are turning up dead, murdered in fascinatingly brutal and clever ways. Murders that make us, the readers, just as complicit as the perpetrator since, while we may want to look away, the vicarious satisfaction we get from them surely condemns us as much as the killer.

I’m using the word ‘we’ here, but maybe I just mean myself–I doubt it! This makes this book sound like… show more.

This was the first Iain Banks book I ever read, and it does not mess around. It has one of my all-time unreliable narrators in Gonzo hack Cameron Colley, a man with a personal connection to the violent crimes he’s investigating. It also features some very clever use of second person to insert the reader directly into the story. This one is certainly not for the squeamish, but Banks is one of those rare writers who can portray elaborate violence in a way that is artistic and thought-provoking rather than merely gratuitous. The fact that the book is underscored by… show more.