<p>Christopher Brookmyre's critically acclaimed, award-winning comic thrillers are a sensation in his native Britain. The Times (London) has praised his writing for being &quot;perpetually in-your-face: sassy, irreverent, and stylish&quot; with &quot;a high-octane sense of the absurd,&quot; and the Literary Review has raved that his books are &quot;very violent, very funny ... comedy with a political edge, which you take gleefully in one gulp.&quot; Now he has his much-anticipated American debut with Not the End of the World, a fast and furious novel set in Los Angeles at the near side of the millennium, at a point when the world is about to spin out of control -- and maybe out of existence. When an oceanic research vessel is discovered with all of its crew vanished, it sets off a chain of events that pulls Sergeant Larry Freeman of the L.A.P.D. out of the ho-hum assignment of overseeing the security for a B-movie film festival and headlong into a frenzied race to stop a terrorist plot. Along the way he must contend with aging porn stars, rabid evangelical Christians, and a mysterious Glaswegian photographer with an unknown agenda, all in a full-throttled -- and ultimately hysterical -- race against time.</p>