Meantime

Critics Review

• A darkest noir, unputdownable crime novel that swerves and surprises, with a gut-punch ending. I loved it!

  Denise Mina

• A gloriously funny mystery that bucks the “cosy crime’ trend” . . . Peppered with one-liners, it reads Raymond Chandler in Glasgow . . . Boyle regularly deploys the beautifully offbeat imagery that characterises the best of his stand-up

  Daily Telegraph

• Starts off the funniest noir – like a Glaswegian Big Lebowski – then takes you somewhere suddenly heartbreaking . . . A debut novel that makes me absolutely INSIST there is more to come

  Marina Hyde

• The gags are so good that the book doesn’t outstay its welcome […] anybody who loves jet-black humour is in for a treat

  Daily Express

• Reads like a twisted Caledonian take on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Inherent vices and scalpel-sharp jokes vie with a very human concern for those least garlanded in the rat race of life

  Ian Rankin

• Part whodunnit, part social safari, part extended stand-up monologue . . . the novel is full of scintillating sentences and perfect lines of dialogue

  Sunday Times

• An enjoyably dark and entertaining tranche of Glasgow noir . . . Imagine Withnail and I stumbling into a Bond movie co-written by William McIlvanney and Mick Herron . . . [A] deft, engaging thriller

  Observer

• A surprisingly moving and beautiful journey through one man’s sh*tshow of a friend’s death/hangover

  Lucy Prebble, screenwriter for Succession

• A fine slice of contemporary noir, full of acute insight into the way we live now

  Mail on Sunday

• Just finished this and f*ck me, it’s total class!! I’m sure all the expletive swears are coming out for this one – and so they should. Ace

  Helen Stanton, Forum Books

• Meantime is a tremendous book: a detective story full of twists and turns that is as beautifully written as it is darkly comic. . . Not surprisingly, Meantime is very, very funny. But it is also a gripping work of stylised crime fiction that marks, I suspect, a new and exciting chapter in Boyle’s multi-faceted career

  Tortoise

• Remarkably moving

  Scotsman

• A sharply written, memorable read

  Scottish Field

• Meantime flies along, filled with laughs and moments that pull you up sharp

  Sun (Scotland)

• Boyle’s key strength is in creating such a believable milieu, even when events are exaggerated, underpinned but never derailed by a tongue-in-cheek humour

  Chortle

• Frankie Boyle’s fiction debut is genuinely engrossing

  Independent

• It’s both funny and moving

  Guardian

• [Frankie Boyle] has graduated into an extremely fine author with his first novel . . . The book lays bare the various worlds of Glasgow . . . and it slowly becomes that awful word, unputdownable, as the fascinating mixture of violence, drugs and unexpected humour surround the reader

  On Yorkshire Magazine

• Boyle’s darkly comic debut unfolds amid vivid scenes of the seamy Glasgow underworld, its hard-bitten humour offset by an unexpectedly tender conclusion

  Daily Mail

• Word-perfect dialogue and wild imagination

  Strathspey & Badenoch Herald