My tenth novel, Breakers, is out today in ebook, published by Orenda Books.
Click here to buy, folks.
‘Breakers may be Doug Johnstone’s best book yet. An unsparing yet sympathetic depiction of Edinburgh’s ignored underclass, with terrific characterisation. Tense, pacy, filmic.’
Ian Rankin
‘Breakers is absolutely what great crime fiction should be – a cracking story, great characters, but it’s also about something and really addresses the “whys” of crime.’
Mark Billingham
‘Breakers again shows that Doug Johnstone is a noir heavyweight and a master of gritty realism. This may be his finest novel yet.’
Willy Vlautin
‘Doug Johnstone is for me the perfect free-range writer, respectful of conventions but never bound by them, never hemmed in. Each book is a different world, each book something new in this world.’
James Sallis
Seventeen-year-old Tyler lives in one of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas. Coerced into robbing rich people’s homes by his bullying older siblings, he’s also trying to care for his little sister and his drug-addict mum. On a job, his brother Barry stabs a homeowner and leaves her for dead, but that’s just the beginning of their nightmare, because the woman is the wife of Edinburgh’s biggest crime lord, Deke Holt.
With the police and the Holts closing in, and his shattered family in devastating danger, Tyler meets posh girl Flick in another stranger’s house, and he thinks she may just be his salvation… unless he drags her down too. A pulsatingly tense psychological thriller, Breakers is also a breathtakingly brutal, beautiful and deeply moving story of a good kid in the wrong family.
