Blind Eye - Stuart MacBride

A Logan McRea story from 2009, this is MacBride on top of his form - dark, witty, and set in Aberdeen. Polish people are turning up with their eyes removed and the sockets burnt. Some of them survive. Inevitably, McRae, back from sick leave (having eaten human flesh in the previous novel) gets seconded to DCI Finnie's team. Meanwhile his immediate boss, DCI Roberta Steel, is pressuring him for a donation to her wife Susan's dream of a baby. On the positive side, his luck is in with the tattooed girl from IB and he uncovers a lead which gets him a free trip to Poland.

In Poland he meets a hot Polish policeman and a blinded bomb maker. This leads to McRae and the girl getting blown up - and we're still only about two-thirds of the way through the book.

I have always enjoyed MacBride. For me, he has overtaken Ian Rankin at the top of the Scottish crime fiction tree. Rankin's problem is that his hero has become aged and inactive. That hasn't yet happened with McBride, but Blind Eye reminds me how great he was in his pomp and that things have faded slightly over more recent novels. Still, as with Rankin, I won't be able to resist new instalments.

In the Cold Dark Ground - Stuart MacBride

I think I must have missed a couple of instalments in the Logan McRae saga. I knew that Logan had given up the big city (Aberdeen) in favour of a rural posting (Banff) back in uniform. I knew he had taken up with the Goth beauty Samantha and that he had been the surrogate father for at least one of DCI Steel's children. But I didn't know that Samantha was in a vegetative coma following an attempt on Logan's life or that the urbane gangland fixer John Urquart had bought his old flat for a ridiculously overblown price - that is to say criminally, comproimisingly inflated.

In the Cold Dark Grave is Logan's tenth outing. His search for a missing person leads to a naked male body in the woods. His head is covered with plastic and his body has been bleached to remove any forensic traces.These are the signature stylings of Malcolm McLennan, "Malk the Knife", gangland supremo of Edinburgh. The dead man turns out to be a partner in a shipping business with apparent links to McLennan. The other partner is missing - but turns up safe and sound back home. Meanwhile the police inquiry, now headed up by Steel's MIT unit, discover the dead man's collection of graphic homemade porn. Turns out his partner was a partner in every sense...

Logan has to cram in a lot of funerals over the coming weekend. First he has to pull the plug on Samantha as the palliative care team at her nursing home have given up hope. At the same time he is called to the deathbed of the Aberdeen kingpin Wee Hamish Mowatt, who has always been oddly fond of Logan and who now wants him to take over his empire. The other contender, the ultra-thug Reuben Kennedy, begs to differ. To top it all off another angry female officer, Superintendent Niamh Harper, takes charge. She seems to have taken against Logan for no reason. But there is a reason - and it's a good one.

MacBride is on top form. Some of the wisecracks are laugh out loud funny, the action dark and bloody, and the plot, despite its complexity, remains somehow credible throughout. The crime is always just an inciting incident in the McRae novels, but here it remains logical and brilliantly deployed. I didn't guess who did it or who the mole on the police team was, but the clues were all there. I say it again, Brilliant.

The Missing and the Dead - Stuart MacBride

Yes, it's a long overdue return to Tartan Noir with the ninth in the Logan McRae novel.

Wisely choosing to vary his established formula, MacBride has given Logan a career-development 'promotion' to the backwoods of Banff, where he is the uniform sergeant in charge of a shift of 'bunnets'.  Logan is trying to make a clean start but events, inevitably, conspire against him.  The discovery of a murdered child brings the MIT to Banff - under DCI Roberta Steel, it goes without saying.  Meanwhile the rubber heelers are after our hero following the collapse of a major attempted murder trial, and a bunch of the local paedos have gone missing.

MacBride's great strengths are plotting, character and prose style - just about the Holy Trinity for any successful crime writer.  He can put some horrendous comments into the mouths of his characters without ever losing humanity or compassion.  To me, he is the leader of the pack in Tartan Noir.  Number Nine is the series is every bit as good as any other, and always recommended.

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.

Blind Eye - Stuart MacBride

 

By my calculation the fifth in the Logan McRae series, Blind Eye is MacBride on top form.  There is always a temptation for writers of series to take their protagonist out of his usual setting, and MacBride gives into that temptation here, sending Logan to Poland to follow up leads.  More often that not, relocating our hero is unmitigated disaster.  Not so here: whilst the story could certainly survive without the excursion, it is probably the better for it.

 

Someone is going round gouging the eyes out of Polish migrants in Aberdeen.  Grampian Police find a stash of weaponry.  They find Simon McLeod, brother of Creepy and son of the appalling Ma McLeod, another victim of the Oedipus killer.  And DI Steel wants Logan to impregnate her wife.

 

MacBride is the darkest of Tartan Noir, saved from unremitting gloom by equally dark humour and an obvious love for the Granite City.  The very last line expresses it perfectly: "That's what happens when you fuck with Aberdeen."

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.

Halfhead - Stuart B MacBride

Stuart MacBride writes the Logan McRae 'Granite City' police procedurals.  Stuart B MacBride, which I guess is some sort of homage to Iain M Banks, wrote Halfhead, a near-future crime thriller set in Glasgow.  How near in the future?  Well, perhaps only one more Tory government away.  Violent criminals are half-headed and happily doing all the filthy jobs.  The poor are kept high on virtual reality and stuffed into enormous towerblock complexes like Monstrosity Square.  Order is maintained by Bluecoats, the agents de police, and the hi-tech gendarmerie-cum-CIA of the Network.

The halfheads are more or less lobotomised - all bar one, anyway.  She used to be Dr Fiona Westfield, esteemed clinician and serial killer.  She killed the wife of Assistant Network Director Will Hunter.  Hunter caught her and halfheading resulted.  But now she's remembering.  She's starting to wake up.  She wants the other half of her head back.  She wants to feel the glorious ecstasy of slaughter again.  And she wants to find out what became of her special project, her 'children'.

I'm no sci-fi buff but I'm so glad I picked this one up.  The level of sci-fictionality is just about right - sufficient to justify the technology required but in no sense fanciful.  Basically it's a fairly straightforward killer chase enlivened with three-dimensional characters with real emotions and, of course, the compulsive Dr Westfield.  Filmicly I thought Blade Runner.  Fictionally I was put in mind of Stephen King's Bachman books.

MacBride-without-the-B's latest book is out.  Birthdays for the Dead is another stand-alone novel, contemporary this time and set, at least partially, in Aberdeen, but without McRae and the other regulars.  It's a must-read for me.

Shatter the Bones - Stuart MacBride

 

I was inspired to seek out something by MacBride after I blogged about his nomination for the Crime Writers' Association Bestseller Dagger over on my Media and Culture blog.

This is the seventh in the Logan McRae series, featuring an Aberdonian detective sergeant.  Joining the series so late I find all the continuing characters fully rounded and full of interesting idiosyncracies - Logan's relationship to his DI's baby daughter, for instance.  At heart, though, it's a police procedural and as fine an example of Tartan Noir as you're ever likely to meet.

Reality show infant prodigy Jenny and her fame-seeking mother have been kidnapped.  The Grampian Police have no clues to go on and no suspects.  They have to do it the hard way.  Then there's drug-dealing Shuggie and his girlfriend, skanky Tanya.  Shuggie is being pursued by debt collectors with unusual enforcement techniques, and Tanya gets herself kidnapped but nobody cares.  The papers are all full of guff about pretty Jen and pretty Alison, except for one newshound who scents a stitch-up.

Great plot, very 2012 in its themes, with just enough Aberdonian wisecracks to flavour the prose.  A crime writer to follow.