Two-Way Split [Kindle Edition]

Where to start...'Two-Way Split' was a complete surprise to me. I didn't know an awful lot about it when I started reading, but straight away I was pulled in. Guthrie has superb knack of setting the pace early, the story never drags. The way the story unravels, you're never sure of what will happen next, no words wasted or spent overly describing anything incidental, it is a fast paced, edge of your seat thriller.

Although it has been out for awhile, it feels as fresh as if it was written only recently. With great characters, fantastic dialogue and an excellently crafted storytelling, 'Two-Way Split' will definitely not be the only Allan Guthrie novel I'll read. In fact I'm already looking for my next fix!

If you like your crime/thrillers well written and packed to the brim with action, I can't recommend this highly enough!

Imagine your wife is being unfaithful, not a rare event in today's world but none the less stressful on a personal level. The man she's having an affair with is a close friend and you all work together. Add to the mix that your chosen profession is armed post office robber and you're all heading out on a job just hours after you have learned of the affair. Finally you've recently stopped taking your medication for some serious mental health issues. Today is going to be an interesting day!

Allan Guthrie's storytelling grabs you by the balls and drags you to a dark and gritty Edinburgh, an unforgiving place that in reality is only a few streets away from pavement pipers and open top buses. An underbelly littered with massage parlours, loan sharks, drug dealers and illegal weapons. A place where for the price of a kindle you can buy most anything or get your legs broken.

The characters, without exception, are fully fleshed whole people who despite being in surreal situations never lose their believability. Pearce is a great character it would have been so easy to write him as a two dimensional Bruce Willis avenging angel type but instead we get a complicated violent man with a moral code albeit slightly twisted. He doesn't know where to buy a gun and when he does he needs to be shown how to use it. The PI making a hash of climbing the scaffold. This kind of realism gives the story some gravitas. More than once I was reminded of "The Wire" in the way violence and crime sat side by side with everyday life.

I bought Two-Way Split after reading Bye Bye Baby and Killing Mum, two novellas by the same author. If you want something a little different from the norm with a dark edge then Mr Guthrie is well worth a try.

Grey is a private detective. He and his partner are hired by Robin- a former child prodigy concert pianist who is also an armed robber - to find out if his wife is cheating on him.

Meanwhile, Pearce is fresh out of prison after doing ten years for murdering his sister's drug dealer and is working for a loan shark while living with his mother, Hilda, who works in a post office that Robin and his ex-cop partner are planing to rob.

And there's much, much more as Allan Guthrie brilliantly weaves all the convoluted strands of the story together in as wild, hilarious, brutal and touching an example of British crime fiction as you're likely to get.

Two-Way Split was- amazingly - Guthrie's first novel and was the 2007 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year. And you can certainly see why. Fantastic stuff.