Filth

alternate cover for ISBN 0393318680

With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially — kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime — and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding, and conscience nagging, intestinal parasite in his gut. Yes, things are going badly, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse.

In Bruce Robertson, Welsh has created one of the most compelling, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction, and surrounded him in a dark and disturbing and often scabrously funny novel about the abuse of everything and everybody.