Two-Way Split Allan Guthrie

[Janluke]

Two-Way Split


Imagine your wife is being unfaithful, not a rare event in today's world but none the less stressful on a personal level. The man she's having an affair with is a close friend and you all work together. Add to the mix that your chosen profession is armed post office robber and you're all heading out on a job just hours after you have learned of the affair. Finally you've recently stopped taking your medication for some serious mental health issues. Today is going to be an interesting day!


Allan Guthrie's storytelling grabs you by the balls and drags you to a dark and gritty Edinburgh, an unforgiving place that in reality is only a few streets away from pavement pipers and open top buses. An underbelly littered with massage parlours, loan sharks, drug dealers and illegal weapons. A place where for the price of a kindle you can buy most anything or get your legs broken.

The characters, without exception, are fully fleshed whole people who despite being in surreal situations never lose their believability. Pearce is a great character it would have been so easy to write him as a two dimensional Bruce Willis avenging angel type but instead we get a complicated violent man with a moral code albeit slightly twisted. He doesn't know where to buy a gun and when he does he needs to be shown how to use it. The PI making a hash of climbing the scaffold. This kind of realism gives the story some gravitas. More than once I was reminded of "The Wire" in the way violence and crime sat side by side with everyday life.

I bought Two-Way Split after reading Bye Bye Baby and Killing Mum, two novellas by the same author. If you want something a little different from the norm with a dark edge then Mr Guthrie is well worth a try.

[allanguthrie]

Delighted you enjoyed the book, Janluke, and thanks very much for taking the time and trouble to review it. Hugely appreciated.

[nigel p bird]

two way split by allan guthrie

Being brief, in a nutshell, keeping it simple, basically, in essence

it's a must read.