The Blade Artist

<p>Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life &#150; 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&#146;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 &#150; and most alarmingly his former self &#150; Francis seems to have other ideas.<br><br>When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California which indicates that her husband&#146;s violent past might also be his psychotic present things start to go very bad very quickly. <br><br><i>The Blade Artist</i> is an elegant electrifying novel &#150; ultra violent but curiously redemptive &#150; and it marks the return of one of modern fiction&#146;s most infamous terrifying characters the incendiary Francis Begbie from <i>Trainspotting</i>.</p>