"Quite Ugly One Morning" by Christopher Brookmyre

Here's a book for those of you who think Christopher Moore is funny. Moore may have the ability to elicit internal chuckles from me (tempered by an equal number of eye rolls), but Brookmyre actually had me snickering out loud in the first few pages. I figured sooner or later Hud would ask me what was so funny, but he never did. That's probably a good thing, though. How is it that I can hear a perfect Scottish accent in my head but utterly fail at making it come out of my mouth? Hud would have been distracted by the hilarity of my awful attempts to channel Sean Connery.

Of course, any book that takes the Lord's name in vain and drops the f-bomb in the very first sentence has got to be as "thrillingly unpleasant" as Esquire claimed. Though I kind of take issue with the unpleasant part. I actually found it to be quite a lovely read, unless we're talking about the first two chapters which treat the reader to a vivid description of the murder scene with all of its excrement and emesis--oh yeah, and a dead body. Hmmm, lovely may be the wrong word. But fun works.

This was my first Brookmyre book. I heard about him here. It's nice to finally find a mystery that doesn't pale in comparison with Agatha Christie's, although admittedly it's very different from hers. In fact, I think nosy investigative journalist Jack Parlabane may be exactly the sort of person Miss Marple always railed against. Contrary to all her sentiments, I am almost tempted to add the rest of this series to my TBR, but the thought of adding four more books at one whack is too daunting for a Monday morning. Maybe I'll do it later in the week.

I learned a lot of new words in this book. All of them were Scottish. Most of them are synonyms for poop. As such, they won't be appearing in any of my Words of the Day posts, but I will throw out a pair for you here: keech and jobbie. (You put them in the bog, by the way.) A few other "Jock" words that I remembered to write down:

smout (a small person, especially a young child)
glaikit (foolish, flighty, giddy)
baw-faced (that of a person with a large, round head; apparently, "baw" comes from the Scottish pronunciation of "ball")

Now you try to channel Sean Connery and see how well you do.