The Blade Artist

<p>Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life&mdash;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.<br /><br />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&mdash;and, most alarmingly, his former self&mdash;Francis seems to have other ideas.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><em>The Blade Artist</em> is an elegant, electrifying novel&mdash;ultra violent but curiously redemptive&mdash;and it marks the return of one of modern fiction's most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from <em>Trainspotting</em>.</p>