Billy is a journalist who drives home one night, completely off of his face on drugs and alcohol. In a car with his girlfriend and brother, he hits someone. They leave the dead man, but Billy gets the job of covering the story for the local newspaper. Of course, the accident only happens once, but Billy relives the ordeal several times, each particularly vivid. Shudder. As Billy uncovers more details, he discovers that he has killed Edinburgh's biggest crime lord, and the result takes him way out of his depth.
St Leonard's police station is mentioned several times throughout the novel, and I happen to live beside it. I can see The Montague pub from my living room, and Arthur's Seat from my kitchen. Hit & Run happens to be the fourth novel I've read this year set in Edinburgh, but I don't think I've ever read anything so local as this. It couldn't be any closer, short of scenes in bedroom. At risk of rambling on about how much I love Edinburgh, I will suffice to say that it all excites me terribly! Yeah, I live here, but the setting is just so perfect for non-Edinburgers, non-Scots, non-UKers - busy streets right beside cliffs and copses.
Setting aside, I'm a fan of Billy Blackmore too. He's just a normal guy who makes a really stupid mistake, but the consequences and the guilt are pretty hefty. A lot is made of his dead mother, but I'm not really sure how that actually matters; that sort of guilt would drive you crazy regardless. And it does. It destroys Billy pretty rapidly, and it's sad to watch him deteriorate. He gets messed up with some dramatic stuff, and with the usual drifts and pulls of his various relationships. I was nervous for the ending, for what kind of reconciliation might go on, but it was all real.
Hit & Run was like that - real, just is what it is, and stripped bare of any nampy pampyness (NB: this is a literary term, obviously). It's refreshing to read something that is offered as a 'oh-no-I-have-to-keep-on-reading' book - my dentist got a look when she broke me away from a particularly riveting scene so that she could give me fillings. Despite the goo and the sad and the horror, Hit & Run was fun.
