Quite Ugly One Morning - Christopher Brookmyre

Jack Parlabane has fled the US and is laying low in his native Scotland. When he wakes, hung over, the smell of fresh vomit is familiar, but he has no memory of creating the source of the smell. A gust of wind locks him out while he investigates and, clad only in a pair of boxers and a grubby t-shirt, Jack decides to get back in through his downstairs neighbour's place. That's when he discovers the source of the odour - his neighbour's dead, his throat cut, two severed fingers stuck up his nose, a tide of vomit washing the floor, and a giant turd on - of all places - the mantelpiece. Which is when a WPC finds him.
I don't want to go too much deeper into the plot, because unravelling its tangled tendrils is part of the enjoyment - through the course of the novel we discover why Jack ran from the US, why he's unhappy to find he's living opposite a cop shop, and why his first thought on being locked out is not to get a locksmith or ask one of the helpful polis to help him but to break and enter. That all runs alongside not only a great mystery that involves the behind-the-scenes machinations of Britain's tortured NHS, but also some great characterisation and dialogue.
With a health care background myself, I particularly liked the scene where Sarah Slaughter, an anaesthetist and the victim's ex-wife, deals with a particularly painful orthopaedic surgeon:

Surgeons chronically misunderstood the role of the anaesthetist. They thought that he, or she, was there in an auxiliary, subservient capacity, to gas the patient and keep the awkward bugger quiet and still why they worked their little miracles. The anaesthetist saw his/her role instead as keeping the patient (a) alive and (b) comfortable while the surgeon did his/her best to ensure otherwise.

There's more, but I'd end up quoting most of the book.
This is Brookmyre's debut novel, and he does a brilliant job of conveying place and sensibility. His work's been criticised for its language and "stomach-turning olfactory and vomitory detail" (reviews are posted on Brookmyre's home site), but I found myself fascinated rather than repelled, albeit glad the book doesn't come with a scratch'n'sniff option. I have already read and reviewed a number of Brookmyre's books, but this is my first in the five (to date) Parlabane novels and it's only through rare discipline (I will make inroads in my own books) that I've not already borrowed the rest of the series from the library. In fact, it's only because they didn't have this first in stock that I haven't already read them. Great fun, absorbing and funny, Brookmyre's a winner. - Alex