Where the Bodies Are Buried - Christopher Brookmyre

“A strident blast of the trumpet to wake up crime fiction readers everywhere.” —Val McDermid 

When small-time heroin dealer Jai McDiarmid turns up dead one fine Glasgow morning, no one is that surprised. A heroin dealer openly sleeping with a big-time drug trafficker’s girlfriend, Jai had made a lot of enemies in a city with little patience for those stirring up trouble. As a result, Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod has no shortage of early leads on the case when she is assigned to investigate it. 

Meanwhile, out-of-work actress Jasmine Sharp is facing more pressing problems. She’s agreed to help out her “Uncle” Jim with his private investigation work, but is having trouble learning the ropes. As a former actress, lying to people comes naturally to Jasmine, but she’s less adept at tailing her targets and remaining undercover. She’s facing a steep learning curve—and is thrown in at the deep end when Uncle Jim goes missing and she realizes that it’s going to be up to her to find him. 

Jasmine begins looking into the cases that Jim was investigating just before he disappeared and goes to meet a man called Tron Ingrams, whose name and address she finds in one of Jim’s case files. Having tracked him down successfully, she is feeling rather pleased with herself—that is, until the car in which they’re traveling comes under gunfire. Who are the assailants—and are they after Tron or Jasmine? Detective Superintendent McLeod’s investigation is also getting complicated: a tip-off that there are explosives in Glasgow’s train station proves to be fake, and a clutch of further murders of some of Glasgow’s drug dealers ramp up the pressure on her to solve the case. Her investigation and Jasmine’s become intertwined, and it becomes increasingly clear that neither is as simple as it seems. 

Where the Bodies Are Buried is a gritty, fast-paced thriller that will appeal to Brookmyre’s fans as well as being the ideal book to introduce readers to his work.


I was given this to read through Netgalley. I thought it was going to be a fast paced kind of book. Unfortunately for me, I never really got into the pace of it at all. I've never read anything by this author and to be honest, I am not sure I will again.

I can just about understand the Glasgow accent, but I just never grasped the characters. Sorry to those that did enjoy his book, I just didn't get to grips with it.