Tommy the Bruce

Meet Tommy Bruce - he's washed-up already, marooned in a ramshackle hotel inherited from dead parents in the armpit of Perthshire, just too far off the main tourist trail to be viable. He's too young to be middle-aged, but too old to be what you could call young (and too lazy to care about it, really).

Saddled with debt, grotty premises that are falling down around him, and a crippling loneliness, Tommy is slowly but determinedly drinking himself and his business out of existence. Until one day, into the lounge-bar and out of the blue, walks Fiona McLean. Before long, she's moved behind the bar, into the hotel, and (remarkably) into Tommy's bed.

Fiona blows into Tommy's life and through the hotel, and with the light she brings, Tommy's fortunes might just be turning around. But in her wake has also slipped in darkness—names and faces from the past who mean Tommy no goodwill at all, criminal forces that threaten to ruin him, the hotel, and what little happiness he's managed, haplessly, to cobble together.

Tommy the Bruce is a precise, chilling, and all too believable crime novel, scored throughout with a genuinely unsettling menace, which is belied by the ease of Yorkston's storytelling and humour. It's a shot of Southern Gothic poured out in the central Highlands.