This is rather out of my normal beat, made even more complicated by a bizarre system of chapters following each other when they would be speaking of a different time, different persons and different stages of one and the same story.

Let me try to unravel the confusion and straighten the narrative hoping to make it simpler to understand and follow.

We begin in a rough housing estate in Glasgow where three childhood friends who live next to each other develop an unusual friendship that withstands time.

Davie Johnston, Zander Leith and Mirren McLean do not let their surroundings get them down. They always believe they will be successful.

The ogre of their childhood is Jono Leith, a mountain of a man, a hard drinker, a well-known criminal who the police keep away from.

Anything his fancy takes to, he goes and gets it, whatever the objections.

His wife, the one he regularly beats up, can only mumble Hail Marys as she gets beaten up.

All the neighbourhood hears the sounds of the beatings but none dare interfere.

Twenty years later, Johnston is the top host and reality-show producer in town. McLean is a respected writer and movie director. And Leith is box-office good.

But they haven't spoken to each other in 20 years, their relationship devastated by one horrific secret.

Thousands of miles away, a young ambitious journalist discovers a tantalizing story from the past.

In a city where nothing is as it seems, she is determined to expose the kind of scandalous drama that usually only happens in movies.

The story also has its sacrificial victim, the ethereal Chloe, perennially plastered Mirren's daughter and always escaping from the expensive home she had been consigned to.