The Blade Artist

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life ?

€“ and is now unrecognisable, even to himself.

A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California.

Some say he?

€™s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary.

But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values.

When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge.

But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies ?

€“ and, most alarmingly, his former self ?

€“ Francis seems to have other ideas.

When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband?

€™s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly.

The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel ?

€“ ultra violent but curiously redemptive ?

€“ and it marks the return of one of modern fiction?

€™s most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.