Not the end of the world

A rollicking, witty novel by the author The Guardian has called "the next star of the genre . . . [who writes in] the sassy, nasty, fast style of the Americans Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen"Christopher Brookmyre's critically acclaimed, award-winning comic thrillers are a sensation in his native Britain.

The Times (London) has praised his writing for being "perpetually in-your-face: sassy, irreverent, and stylish" with "a high-octane sense of the absurd," and the Literary Review has raved that his books are "very violent, very funny . .E . comedy with a political edge, which you take gleefully in one gulp." Now he has his much-anticipated American debut with Not the End of the World, a fast and furious novel set in Los Angeles at the near side of the millennium, at a point when the world is about to spin out of controland maybe out of existence.When an oceanic research vessel is discovered with all of its crew vanished, it sets off a chain of events that pulls Sergeant Larry Freeman of the L.A.P.D. out of the ho-hum assignment of overseeing the security for a B-movie film festival and headlong into a frenzied race to stop a terrorist plot.

Along the way he must contend with aging porn stars, rabid evangelical Christians, and a mysterious Glaswegian photographer with an unknown agenda, all in a full-throttledand ultimately hystericalrace against time.