"Body Politic" by Paul Johnston

March 2020. Edinburgh is an independent city state ruled by a Board of celibate Guardians with Platonic ideals and guardsmen (Auxiliaries) who are officially known only by barrack name and number. It runs casinos and a red light district for tourists, its main source of income. Quintilian Dalrymple demoted Auxiliary, works in the Parks and moonlights as a private investigator. But a murder has been committed and the Guardians have need of him.

Despite the weird setting, this was really just an average crime thriller about the hunt for a serial killer. Sex, violence and Plato. Some good metaphors "weirder than sweet-smelling sewage" and some that felt, frankly, forced: "He looked so welcoming that I clenched my buttocks"; "the fog had returned and was settling over the city as thickly as the mustard gas in a Wilfred Owen poem"; "Then, out of my favourite colour, an idea came to me".

September 2016; 345 pages