The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson (Book 2) [Paperback]

Douglas Lindsay's Barney is the most notorious serial killer of his time--but wouldn't hurt a fly. It is all a misunderstanding, a series of accidents and a dead mother with stiffs in the fridge; but now Barney is on the run, blamed for every unsolved murder going and various Scotland missed penalties in the World Cup. Seeking peace of mind and safety, he heads for a remote monastery, where, in due course, he is followed by the police--but not before a series of violent deaths, many of them involving his scissors.

Barney cannot imagine that the Abbot is such a man; he'd seemed happy enough after the cut. Perhaps, Barney ponders, he has a secret mirror and checked the cut after it was given. Barney's imagination races. Maybe the Abbot has a lot more than a secret mirror...

Everyone is in this monastery because they have secrets, and some of those secrets are a deal more worrying than Barney's--and the past of the monastery, its resort to cannibalism in the hard winter of 1938 and whatever it was that happened at Two Trees, is of even greater concern. And what is the Abbot hiding under his robes? Douglas Lindsay has a scattershot sense of humour which alternates the mildly routine with the uproarious--there is always another joke along in a moment if one misfires. The hapless Barney, guilty of little except being deeply boring, is a comic creation of real merit, and the mysteries of the monastery is a genuinely involving puzzle. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

With classic timing and delight in the grotesque, Lindsay has crafted a macabre masterpiece where content lives up to style.

Gloriously over the top, very bloody and very, very funny.

This is extremely well-written, highly amusing and completely unpredictable in its outrageous plot twists and turns.

A novel which is both genuinely silly and a fun read.

A mad, macabre romp with surreal characters and cutting black humour.

In the follow-up to 'The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson', Barney has become a barber on the run. Suddenly notorious throughout Scotland as the worse serial killer since the Black Death, he has escaped Glasgow by hiding out in a monastery in the frozen far north-west. However, as the snow descends, and the police slowly close in on his whereabouts, a new, vicious and altogether more psychotic murderer is wreaking havoc amongst the monks...

The forest air is freezing, nothing stirs. And in among the white farrago of Christmas trees, beside a burn where a slender stream of water trickles through the ice, sits Brother Morgan. Back resting uncomfortably against a young Douglas fir, hands and face blue, lips purple, yet a smile on those lips and in the eyes. At peace with the Lord. The front of his thin white tunic is soaked through with blood, which has dried to dark red, now frosted white. And, inserted deep into Brother Morgan’s neck, the instrument of his death – a pair of scissors. Long, thin, cold steel; scissors which, a few hours earlier, had been used to cut the hair of Brother Steven, after the fashion of Mike McShane in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.