I have just finished reading Christopher Brookmyre’s new book The Atttack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks and what a book it is. The book is dedicated to James Randi and Richard Dawkins, which for many will be recommendation enough.

As a firm fan of Brookmyre and especially his character Jack Parlabane, the cat-burgling crime reporter I had mixed feelings about the news that the book was about Parlabane writing from beyond the grave. The prospect of a hard-bitten sceptic who has no belief in the afterlife finding himself enjoying life after death is juicy, but nobody wants to see a favourite character being written out.

It took a while to get used to the changing focus of the book, with the first few chapters being written from different viewpoints, but suddenly it all came together and I was dying to know what would happen next in all the strands. In other words, a typical Brookmyre novel and with all the trademark humour, cultural references and dead bodies.

Integral to the story are discussions on the relationship between science, religion and the paranormal. Many of the arguments for and against religion/spirituality are included but in a more amusing and concise way than normal, making it an ideal book for anyone interested in the debate but lacking the patience to read The God Delusion.

What unsettled me was how persuasive some of the arguments in favour of pseudoscience and Inteligent Design were – but then that’s what makes them so dangerous. Brookmyre is firmly on the side of science, but he manages to write characters who make a good case against.

As the book is a thriller with a lot of the pleasure coming from having the pennies drop at the right moment I am not going to spoil anyone’s reading by giving any more details of the story, and its difficult to refer to any of the best things about the book without spoiling it, but I will say this: at the end of it all I was as impressed as ever with the way loose ends were tied up.

Its a characteristic of Brookmyre’s books that he not only ties up all the loose ends but even ties up a few that an average reader had forgotten all about. In this case he went one better and impressed me greatly, by leaving a final surprise until the very end – beyond the end of the story in fact, right at the end of the acknowledgements. I finished the book feeling a little uneasy about one very specific thing which bugged me and which I thought was a mistake. A mistake which would only trouble a computer geek, but still a mistake. But that one final thing was cleared up and acknowledged as a deliberate mistake and it became the cherry on top of the cake for me.

Again, it would be spoiling the fun for me to be any more specific, but do check it out.