They meet Chong, who seems to believe reality is simulated, and find signs that British Intelligence are involved in Marina's death. As a recovering addict myself, the drug scenes, though comical, shine a light on how harrowing and chaotic dependence can be. When Valium addict Felix McAveety's best friend Marina is found murdered in the local park, he goes looking for answers to questions that he quickly forgets.

Marina Katos's body is found in a park and the police don't seem to know or care who committed the crime. Critics largely praised Boyle's comedic dialogue, his descriptions of Glasgow and its inhabitants, and the revelations of what led to Felix's drug dependence. A lot of his descriptive writing is highly original but there are also some familiar references too, such as the difficulty in locating the toilets in a Wetherspoon's pub, which is a conundrum I'm sure we've all faced at some point.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Nevertheless, I felt that they were throwing plot twists quite fast and accelerating the story to a pace we'd not met before, almost as if there was a challenge to finish the book soon and squeeze it all in! There’s plenty of laughs, emotional depth and a tear jerking section that backs right in to life affirming. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There’s lots of humour throughout, as you would expect from Frankie Boyle, but I enjoyed the layers of dark conspiracy that made up the mystery that Felix sets out to uncover.

There are red herrings along the way and also a few twists but the novel builds to a quite revelatory climax as Felix's past is revealed and he and Jan confront the killer. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. After a few chapters I found this really was not the case it was funny but there was something I couldn’t put my finger that made the story feel flat.I fought the urge to give up several times as I became slightly bewildered by the ‘picaresque’ (more like rambling and disjointed) plot and the abundance of vaguely minor characters who flit in and out. I think there's a crime story in this book - ok so there definitely is, but it's not really all that front and centre, there's so much more going on around and about it that it does, on occasion, get.

All said, a very strong debut novel which is eminently readable and enjoyable, packed full of every human emotion there is. It’s VERY political, extremely satirical and I’m not sure if it’s all just Frankie Boyle writing a massive Parody of life today.Fascism, though… my worry is that we might be heading towards some kind of techo fascism, although it might be just a type of hyper-surveillance that is indistinguishable from actual fascism: where everyone is reduced to a kind of ultra-monitored husk. Rachael O'Connor – a delusional stalker who formerly pursued Felix and is currently obsessed with a man named Greg. As leverage, Brond positioned Mount as prime suspect in Marina's murder, and killed the witness Rachael. Anthony said that Meantime is dense with similes that are "caustic and often surreal"; Boyle identified a stylistic overlap between detective fiction and insult comedy.

The investigation stumbles along at times and doesn't seem to gain much traction and Boyle also takes time out describing Felix's state of mind, as he ponders the meaning of his and our existence on the planet. There is also lots of commentary about current trends and future challenges like AI - Artificial Intelligence.First of all, and probably most importantly, it is extremely funny, not just in the jokes inserted which are very clearly Frankie Boyle jokes, regardless of which character they come from they all land in his voice, but there's other jokes that work in the format of a book that wouldn't work at all in stand up, so there's clearly a good amount of comedic writing talent here, not just an obvious comic talent. In a four-star review for The Daily Telegraph, Kerridge praised that the author "regularly deploys the beautifully offbeat imagery that characterises the best of his stand-up", and wrote that he could hear Boyle in his head as the narrator. I don't think the plot was perfect but this novel is a great addition to Scottish Crime fiction - more Christopher Brookmyre than Val McDermaid - and I'm really looking forward to Frankie's next novel.