Meantime: The gripping debut crime novel from Frankie Boyle

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With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. Reading with my brain adopting Frankie's familiar voice telling stories about the people, times, and places that I recognised really enhanced my enjoyment of this book. There’s also a great affection for Glasgow and its inhabitants, with all their screw-ups and foibles, and it’s this that gives the novel not just wit but heart. The paranoid characters obsess about the end of the world and whether we’re really living in a computer simulation. There is a large cast of characters, each one having their own idiosyncrasies and each one of them is memorable for some reason or other.

If like me, you can find humor in even the most desperate of situations, then this one will fit well within your wheelhouse. Writing a crime novel now appears to be a well-established rung on the career ladder of white male television entertainers, achieved with varying degrees of success and skill, so it’s a relief to find that Frankie Boyle’s first work of fiction is an enjoyably dark and entertaining tranche of Glasgow noir.

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.

Meantime is a tremendous book: a detective story full of twists and turns that is as beautifully written as it is darkly comic.

Taking readers from the world of drugs, to artificial intelligence, to conspiracy theory through to politics (Like AI without the I part . Docherty creates a distraction at a Burns supper charity event so Jane and Felix can meet Mount, but Brond takes them aside instead.

I can say without any doubt that I have never laughed so much in my life reading a book as I did during this, it got to the point where I was still laughing at something pages ago and then as I came across something else it just got silly and I was laughing so much that often I forgot what I was laughing at. There’s plenty of laughs, emotional depth and a tear jerking section that backs right in to life affirming. With Trainspotting-esque drug-fuelled frenzies, this has it all: complex and hilarious characters, Glaswegian political undertones and of course, the thrilling.But to break through his drug-induced fog and get closer to the truth Felix enlists the help of a dying crime novelist, Jane Pickford and his crisis-ridden friend Scott.