Flesh House - Stuart MacBride

Flesh House, from 2008, is the fourth of the Logan McRae novels, perhaps the most compelling series in contemporary Tartan Noir.  It shares all the regular tropes - horrors from the past, injustice righted, revenge - and features all the regular favourite characters.  It's the novel where MacBride really gets into his stride but you also get the sense that he's developing habits and the occasional shorthand approach to characterisation.  The premise here is great - the serial killer known as the Flesher has returned to butchery after twenty years; so has the man found guilty of the earlier crimes, now freed on bail.  DCI Insch, his blood pressure always about to blow, was on the original investigation.  So was the easy-going Chief Constable of the West Midlands, who pops up to Aberdeen to lend a friendly hand.  Other officers on the case are being targeted.  Who by?  Why?

The weak point for me were the scenes inside the Flesher's holding cell.  MacBride is exploring Stockholm Syndrome here, and there is a key plot point involved, but there were too many visits to the scene and for me it just got tedious.  I started skipping them and it affected my understanding of the plot not at all. I didn't figure out whodunnit, but the twist was too convoluted for me to care too much.  I always feel you need to know your villain - to a much greater extent than we know this villain - in order to get the real visceral shock.  I mean, that's the point of noir, isn't it - the horror of which seemingly hyper-normal human beings are capable of?

 As ever, a good, fun read - but not the best of the series so far as I was concerned.

Cold Granite - Stuart MacBride

This is it, the first of the Logan McRae series.  Well, I say first.  Certainly it is the first to be published - it is, indeed, MacBride's first published book - but the sheer amount of backstory here makes it clear to me that there was an earlier, unpublished attempt.  No doubt whilst hawking that round publishers MacBride wrote a successor, Cold Granite, which was accepted, helped, probably, by the amount of backstory.

Anyhow, it's a thumpingly good start, an assured welcome to the world of Grampian Police.  Logan is back on duty a year after having his guts perforated by a serial killer he captured.  This is why they call him Laz, because he is Lazarus back from the dead.  The day starts badly.  The mutilated body of a small boy have been found.  Things spiral downhill from there.  DI Steel is otherwise engaged, so Laz is assigned to DI Insch, he of the temper and the sweeties.  The pathologist is Laz's ex, Isobel.  The newshound harrying McRae for the inside track is the new-in-town Colin Miller.

There are other magnificent writers of Scottish crime fiction - Rankin, McDermid, Mina (whose just won an award for her latest) - and all crime fiction is to a greater or lesser extent noir, but MacBride is far and away the most accomplished purveyor of Tartan Noir as a specific genre, and with Cold Granite established himself as such from Day One.

Broken Skin - Stuart MacBride

The third in the superb Logan McRae series, and to my mind the best I have so far read.  Broken Skin features multiple crimes (burglaries, rapes, a fisting-to-death on Aberdeen's BDSM scene, and the world's worst brat-from-Hell, porn and paedophilia) mixes in Logan's complicated love-life, DI Steel and her cigs, DI Insch, his sweeties and boiling blood pressure, The Mikado and the legendary Ma Stewart.  The best line, which in its way epitomises the tone, goes to DI Steel: "I'd rather you didn't wank off my constables with a bread knife."  Quite.

Violent, funny, serious on subjects which warrant seriousness, and effortlessly flowing - near as dammit 600 pages, which just fly by.  The pupil of Rankin and McDermid, MacBride is surely the best of his Tartan Noir generation.