Deception -- Denise Mina

When Lachlan Harriot's wife is found guilty of murdering a former patient*, he is desperate to find new information that will allow an appeal.  He knows that she didn't do it.  She couldn't have -- she's his Susie, his love, the mother of his child and a brilliant psychiatrist.

So he breaks into her study.  And what he finds in there makes him start to wonder.  Deception is a collection of Lachie's diary entries during the time of his investigation.

Lachlan is the best unreliable narrator I've come across in a long time -- because it was never quite clear if he was actually unreliable.  Right up until the end, I wasn't sure if I could trust his version of events -- but I wasn't sure that I couldn't either.  His moods changed quickly, as did his suspicions, and his feelings towards his wife changed drastically from page to page.  Sometimes two or three times on the same page, even.  But it's always all about him -- he'd prefer to discover that Susie was a murderess than that he'd been cuckolded.

Regardless of whether you trust him or not -- or even like him -- he's always entertaining.  After transcribing an exclamation point-heavy letter into his case file, he says:

Fucking hell, Donna!!  Learn to punctuate?!  I shouldn't take the piss out of the dead, she might come back from the grave and beat me to death with an exclamation mark.

Denise Mina continues to be my favorite author for character description:

Stevie Ray is a bad man, a selfish man who makes money by cashing in on the misery of others, but after meeting him it's hard to believe he actually means any harm to anyone.  He is small and balding in a messy way, not a straightforward receding hairline.  He has a brown hairy button on his forehead and thin wisps all over the top.  He's short and fat as well and ties his raincoat belt in a knot at his swollen waist, which makes it look worse.  He's simultaneously repellent and sympathetic.  It's like he's got his charisma on backward.

Those last two sentences actually apply pretty well to Lachlan himself, actually. 

Fab.

*Not just any old murder -- a particularly gruesome murder.  A stabbing and tongue-ripping-out murder.  Possibly even two murders, but the second body hasn't been found.