DS Bruce Robertson is without a doubt the most repulsive character you'll come across. A truly vile, lying, scheming, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, violent, diseased, sociopathic, filthy animal for whom you will have absolutely no sympathy. He's also host to a tapeworm, which contributes to the story at various points, and, towards the end, tells us Robertson's 'back story'. 
 Halfway through this book, I was absolutely convinced there was no way on earth Welsh could possibly make you feel anything resembling sympathy for him. It wasn't going to be that kind of book - this character was so repugnant, you couldn't possibly feel anything but extreme distaste for someone like that. 
 The fact that in the last fifty or so pages of the book, you actually start to feel sympathy for him - almost, even, to like him - is testament to what a great writer Welsh is. 
 The most impressive thing is that this is both a very difficult book to get through, but an even harder one to stop reading. The lead character is SO revolting. His behaviour gets more and more repulsive - you keep expecting to think you've read the worst, but he always seems to manage to surpass it. 
 A grimly brilliant book. 
 A word of warning - I read this on the Kindle. The sections featuring the tapeworm are presented as graphics rather than text, with the result that they are both absolutely tiny and very difficult to read, and you can not zoom in to enlarge the text in these parts. For the longer tapeworm sections (towards the end), I actually found myself having to switch to reading it on the Kindle app on my laptop to be able to read it comfortably. 
 If I'd known this, I'd have opted for the paper product rather than the ebook.