The April Dead - Alan Parks

 I remember coming across the first of Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series four or five years ago.   Bloody January and February's Son are reviewed on this blog.   I somehow missed the third, Bobby March Will Live Forever (great title) and here we are with number four, The April Dead.   Still back in 1974 Glasgow, McCoy is called to a tenement flat where a young man has blown himself up making a bomb.   This of course is the heyday of the Troubles in Ulster, mainland IRA outrages, the Angry Brigade and all that.   But what got this kid so fired up?

Then Harry is approached by an American, Andrew Stewart, whose son Donny has gone missing from the naval base at Greenock.   Harry agrees to look into it, but first he has to collect his old pal from the in-care days, Stevie Cooper, about to be released from six months in prison at Aberdeen.   Stewart and Stevie take to one another.   Meanwhile forensics find someone else's blood in the bombmaker's flat, a very rare type, Donny Stewart's type.

Homemade bombs start going off everywhere - a smallish one in the cathedral, something much bigger at a local brewery.   People are dying.   Harry finds himself leading an nvestigation into rightwing nationalism, the Territorial Army, and torture techniques developed for officially-denied use in Northern Ireland.

As ever, the characters are brilliantly well-drawn and the plot keeps deepening.   I especially enjoyed the way Parks handled the involvement of the travelling fairground community.   The April Dead is every bit as good as the first two in the series.   I really must look out for March and May.

The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

1979 - Val McDermid

 1979 is the first of the  semi-autobiographical Allie Burns series.   Like McDemid, Allie is a smalltown Scots girl who wins a place at a major English university and, after an apprenticeship on provincial English newspapers, lands a job on a major Scottish daily.

She's initially confined to 'miracle baby' stuff - so-called women's stories - in the sexisr world of Seventies journalism, but she has talent and literary style, and thus becomes involved in her colleague Danny Sullivan's breakthrough story about tax avoidance.   The problem is, the story came from Danny's adopted brother who is central to the scam.   Danny is praised by his colleagues, ostracized by his family.

When Allie happens upon a scoop of her own - the terrorist wing of Scots Nationalism, she naturally turns to Danny for support.  Only a man would be accepted undercover.   The story gets really big, verging on too big.   Allie and Danny get close, but not that close, because it turns out Danny is gay.   And Allie's friend and supporter from the Clarion's Women's Section is also not what she seems...

The background detaial - the Winter of Discontent - is brilliantly brought to life.   I remember it well.   The world of newspapers, pre-Murdoch, is very much another country.   The characters are compelling.   McDermind is, of course, at the pinnacle of her craft.   Only the best writers can get away with leaving the murder as long as she does.   I genuinely thought there wasn't going to be one - and it didn't bother me one jot.

An excellent book from one of the very best.   I'm looking forward to 1989.

The Dark Remains - William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 On the face of it, The Dark Remains is an unexpected treat, an unfinished novel by the pioneer of Tartan Noir completed by the master of the form.  In reality it falls below the average of either.  The story itself has potential: the murder of a front man for one of the local gangs threatens to spark a turf war in 1972, when Glasgow was still dying on its hind quarters.

It is perfectly readable, obviously, but there is a conspicuous lack of darkness, the mordant black humour for which both McIlvanney and Rankin were known in their heyday, even credible violence.  The names of the characters - Carter, Thompson - seem like placeholders for something better.  I didn't figure out who the murderer was, but then I rarely do.  I was neither surprised nor especially interested when it was revealed.  There is an tagged-on episode in which the stirrer-up of the turf war gets his comeuppance.  I had forgotten who he was, which in a large print novel of less than 300 pages read over two consecutive days is not good.

It's trivial footnote to a significant career.  There was a reason McIlvanney left it unfinished.  Rankin can still deliver a good novel but it's all about retirement these days, the older man looking back.  Canongate would have done better to get Stuart Macbride or one of the younger lions to work on Dark Remains (which is also a poor title, having nothing to do with the plot).

A Song for the Dark Times - Ian Rankin

 

Rankin's latest Rebus is as good as ever.  Late phase Rebus, of course, means retired Rebus getting involved, one way or another, in crimes being investigated by Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox.  And there's no change here.  What I would say, though, is that in A Song for the Dark Times the potentially tricky mix is done better than in some of the others.  The cases are separate but involve some of the same people.  Rebus is called up to the rural North when his estranged daughter's partner is murdered and Samantha is a prime suspect.  Meanwhile in Edinburgh Fox joins the team led by Siobhan's partner DCI Graham Sutherland, investigating the murder of wealthy Saudi student and James Bond fan, Salman Bin Mahmoud.  Fox has been seconded from MIT because Salman's father is being detained by the Saudi authorities and the Foreign Office want oversight of the case.  The connection between the two cases is that the Meiklejohn family owns the former PoW camp in which Sam's partner's body was found, and Lady Isabella Meiklejohn appears to be Salman's girlfriend.

It's very clever - beautifully written, of course - and eminently satisfying in the resolution.  Rankin on top form.

Field of Blood - Denise Mina

 

Field of Blood is the first in the Paddy Meehan series.  Paddy is really Patricia but is known as Paddy because of the real Glasgow hardman who was a famous victim of injustice in the 1960s and 70s.  Mina tells us in the afterword that her mother arranged for her to meet him when she was starting out as a journalist.

It is 1981 and the female Paddy is also starting out as a journalist, albeit she is currently just on the copyboy bench.  Colleagues start to take notice when Baby Brian is found on the rail tracks and Paddy's fiance's cousin is arrested for his murder.  The cousin and his accomplice are both boys themselves.  The echoes of Jamie Bulger are obvious.

Paddy starts to investigate and soon forms the impression that an adult was also involved, and that adult controlled the kids.  At this point - slightly late for my liking - the story really takes off.  Paddy is put in real jeopardy before the end.  Everything is credible and logical.  My only reservations are there was slightly too much time spent on Paddy's Catholic background - although, her escape from convention is a key part of her character development - and the Meehan material was not really worth the trouble.  Perhaps Mina takes it further in subsequent novels in the series.

I am already a big fan of Mina.  I consider this not to be her best novel, largely because in other books she has set a higher standard.  It is still a cracking good read.

Ghost in the Machine - Ed James

 

There are times when what you need is a straightforward police thriller, preferably Scottish.  And having finished the 600+ pages of Mr Biswas was one.  Two days leisurely read; great characterisation, interesting plot and sound resolution.  Perfect.

Ed James's series (one of several) is set in contemporary Edinburgh and features newly-appointed DC Scott Cullen.  Cullen is a great device for James.  He's only around 30 and has a long career in front of him (and there are already several other novels in the series).  What James really does well is giving his hero the right number of gaffes and crucial discoveries.  He places him square at the centre of the action and keeps him there.  He has not saddled Cullen with a drink and drug problem, or an ex-wife or any of the usual stereotypical problems.  Instead, he is a normal guy with a normal guy's everyday problems - enough to give him three-dimensional realism but not enough to get in the way of the plot.

The supporting characters are equally good and I look forward to downloading Scott Cullen 2 to my Kindle, the next time I just need a solid, professionally-crafted, deeply pleasurable read.

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.

Broken Ground - Val McDermid

It was my intention to read the Karen Pirie novels in order but Broken Ground is the fifth, published in 2018. Fortunately McDermid is so skilled that it makes no real difference - she updates the reader on what they need to know, which is that Pirie's partner has been killed and she is in a period of bereavement.

The business of the Historic Cases Unit goes on however. At first it seems the body found alongside two wartime Harley Davidson motorbikes is outside the unit's remit. They only deal with deaths less than seventy years old in which there is a realistic chance of relatives and witnesses who are still living. Closer examination reveals the dead man is wearing trainers from 1995. Pirie and her gormless assistant Jason 'The Mint' Murray enter the world of wartime double agents, contemporary professional strongmen and motorhome etiquette of the mid-nineties.

The plot rolls out over 500 pages which unfold like a dream. I didn't much like the flashbacks but they were effective enough as a device for delivering the back story. I thoroughly enjoyed the development of the main characters and I especially enjoyed McDermid's daring finale in which Karen arrests her suspect but all her problems are left hanging for the next installment. So what am I supposed to do now, Val, if I find myself looking at Volume 2 and Volume 6? I know, the answer is obvious (get both), but which do I read first?

In a House of Lies - Ian Rankin

The odd dud is inevitable when you are as prolific as Ian Rankin, and this is undoubtedly one of his. It seems to be based on two celebrated podcasts about murder, the Adnan Syed case which made Serial a worldwide hit and the murder of Daniel Morgan in London in 1987. Basically we have the murder of a private detective and the key clue about how long a car was parked where it was found which hinges on the analysis of soil and grass. Note to Rankin: You're a crime writer; never assume your crime readers are less informed than you are.

The second problem is that Rankin continues to employ the detective triad which, for me at least, is no longer interesting or indeed credible: Rebus, Malcolm Fox and Siobhan Clarke. It is essentially a good idea. Now he is retired Rebus can be even more of a wild card; Clarke has to obey the rules or her long association with Rebus will hold her back; and Fox polices the police. The problem is, they all come with baggage from up to 21 previous outings, or, in Fox's case, from two novels in which he was the replacement for Rebus. This means a certain number of secondary characters have to revisited, even if there is no plotting need. If Rankin isn't at the very top of his game, this can lead to an imbalance between investigation and back story. Needless to say, in Rebus #22, Rankin isn't at the apex of his ability.

It's readable - Rankin is always readable - but the problems are overwhelming. Both the A plot and the B subplot are fundamentally unbelievable; no one kills or accepts the blame for killing for such trivial reasons. And the novel itself is about 25% too long. I hope Rankin recovers form for the next Rebus. I for one could not take another misfire, especially as recent instalments have been so good.

February's Son - Alan Parks

I read Parks' first, Bloody January, in bloody January, which was apt. Damned if I was going to wait until next February to read the second in the Harry McCoy series, which is this, February's Son. It starts three weeks after Bloody January ended. McCoy has recovered from his injuries and is called into work the day before his sick leave was supposed to end. This being Glasgow in 1973, there has been a murder, a nasty one. The victim is the current star of Celtic FC and soon-to-be son-in-law of the murderous Jake Scobie, head of one of the Glasgow crime families. Has Jake heard that young Charlie has been playing away? It's a promising line of inquiry, but it grinds to a halt when Jake is butchered in just the same way.

Meanwhile McCoy's friend and childhood protector Stevie Cooper has seen a picture of one of their abusers, 'Uncle Kenny', in the paper. Now they know who Kenny is, can Cooper and McCoy let things lie? We all know that's unlikely.

As I said back in January, Parks is a real find, a direct heir to Ian Rankin, albeit they are about the same age. The police side of his stories is pure procedural with all the banter and implicit loyalties and feuds that involves. The noir side is very dark indeed. Everybody over the last decade has done a child abuse storyline, but Parks has his lead cop as a victim who carries his abuse with him for life.

February's Son is absolutely as good as Bloody January, maybe even slightly better. I like, for example, the way McCoy's relationship with Susan is handled, and the development of the role of Jumbo. The ending is again just a fraction contrived, but this is my one and only criticism. I loved it. Roll on March!

Bloody January - Alan Parks

Bloody January is a debut novel, though Parks cleverly leads us to believe there was an earlier story. Publishers Canongate have done a solid job in promoting Parks and they are right to do so. I can't remember a better first novel in any Tartan Noir series. DI Harry McCoy is definitely on his way to a TV near you.

Parks' masterstroke is to combine the two leading tropes of today's Scottish crime fiction - noir and nostalgia. Bloody January is set in 1973, in the week Bowie took Aladdin Sane to Glasgow. McCoy and his new mentee Wattie are hanging around the bus station when a young lad shoots a young girl, then himself. The trail leads to aristocracy, big business, police corruption, the substrates of prostitution and - for a fleeting cameo, Bowie himself. What else could anyone who remembers 1973 possibly want?


The denouement is suspenseful and bloody, on the rooftops of Glasgow in a snowstorm. Brilliant.


My only criticism is that in working the tropes Parks has deployed (and combined) two that for me are already cliché - the obligatory beating of our hero and a flashback to his wretched childhood in a religious children's home. These, however, only occupy a few pages and do explain his relationship with the local villain Stevie Cooper. Other than that, the characters - especially Cooper - are compelling and credible. I especially liked McCoy's boss Murray who comes across straight but who might have a lot of secrets behind his success. The writing, both prose and dialogue, reads absolutely note-perfect and is technically very accomplished. There are writers who have been hammering away for decades who come nowhere near Parks' level of artistic fluency.

A debut that I thoroughly recommend. I can't wait for the next instalment.

Rather be the Devil - Ian Rankin

This is the 2016 instalment of Rebus and continues the high standard of recent Rebus novels. Again, Rebus is shadowed by the insipid Malcolm Fox, former Professional Standards chief, now attached to the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh. Fox is meant to be the antithesis of Rebus, the good cop who plays by the rules, but he never manages to do so and is far too dull to do anything but get in Rebus's way. This was not the case in the two standalone Fox novels, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead, both of which I greatly enjoyed, but the sooner he is ditched from the Rebus series the better. The only contrast we need with Rebus is his former oppo Siobhan Clarke, whose character continues to add richness to successive novels.


The structure here is complex. Rebus is taking his mind off his health problems by looking into an almost forty year old cold case, the murder of Maria Turquand, strangled in a city centre hotel full of bankers and pop stars and crooks. The police, meanwhile, are investigating an attack on local gangster Darryl Christie. His gangland mentor, Big Ger Cafferty, is a prime suspect and so is Anthony Brough, the missing grandson of banking buccaneer Sir Magnus Brough, who was peripherally involved in the Turquand case insofar as his deputy was married to Maria. Thus Rebus is drawn in to the inquiry.


In fact, the cold case storyline rather fizzles out. The main story, however, is full of fun. Big Ger himself plays a full and active role - Rankin is so taken with him, indeed, that this edition contains a short story 'Cafferty's Day' "exclusive to Waterstone's" (which is not as impressive as it might sound, since Waterstone's is the owner of W H Smith's and now Foyles' and is thus the only British mass market book chain). In fact the story is neither here nor there. It could have been worse - at least it ties in to the main novel.


In summary, then: a top quality police procedural, as good as anything similar in the market and a good deal better than most. Rankin remains on top form, which is saying something given that 2017 was the 30th anniversary of the first Rebus.

Garnethill - Denise Mina

Garnethill (1999) is the first of Mina's series of the same name featuring ex-mental patient and abuse survivor Maureen O'Donnell. It is also her first novel, though you'd never guess.


Maureen has decided to end her relationship with Douglas, a therapist from her mental health clinic. She gets terrifically drunk one night, rolls home to her flat in Garnethill, and wakes next morning to find Douglas in her living room, his head hanging off and something deeply unpleasant hidden in her hall cupboard. Obviously Maureen is prime suspect - if not her, the police reason, then her drug dealer brother Liam.


Despite her somewhat addled memories of the evening in question, Maureen is confident she didn't do it. The police don't seem to be listening, so she investigates herself, sometimes with Liam's assistance, more often with Lesley, her biker pal from the women's refuge. Liam aside, she gets no support from the rest of her family, who initially assume she did it during one of her mental episodes. Maureen's mother Winnie is a colourful alkie. Maureen's sisters are both upwardly mobile, loving but with no idea about their younger siblings. Their father has long since disappeared, following young Maureen's allegations of abuse.


The plot is complex but held together, more or less, by the theme of abuse - sexual, physical, official. Even dead Douglas gets involved by leaving Maureen an appreciable amount of money as some sort of compensation. To say any more about the story would be to give too much away. The writing is of a very high standard, the tone - enlivened here and there by the grim Glaswegian humour - is spot on. The characters - those within Maureen's ambit, anyway - are fully rounded and very human in their instability. Perhaps the antagonists could do with a touch more development; circumstances got in the way of me posting this review yesterday, having finished it the evening before, and I had to take a moment to remember who killed Douglas and why, and I still can't remember the character's name.


That's my only criticism. I loved Garnethill. Sadly, it transpires I read the second in the series, Exile, back in 2015 and reviewed it here. Turns out I didn't like it as much as I liked Garnethill. Still, there's always Resolution.

[Previously posted on this blog.]

Exile is the second of Mina's 'Garnethill' trilogy. The first, not surprisingly, is Garnethill.  The heroine, Maureen, is a damaged, abused young woman with a drug-dealing brother - not unlike Alex Morrow in the later novels.  The setting would seem to be Glasgow, as it should be in Tartan Noir, but actually about half the book takes place in London, which is a tremendous mistake, especially since the people Maureen mixes with there, even the copper with the Met who eventually listens to her, are Glaswegian,

It's a second novel which Mina made doubly hard for herself as the second in a series.  One of Mina's themes is that Scottish women have traditionally been abused by their men.  She wants to say that oppression has made them strong and feisty, a positive message.  Sadly, she undermines herself at every turn, because two of the sleaziest baddies are women and all the white knights who ride to Maureen's rescue are men - Scottish men, at that.

Exile is highly readable.  It is well plotted but, in this Orion paperback, poorly proof-read.  There are far too many characters, especially the ill-defined secondary women, and I often had to pause and wonder who is this when they reappeared much later.  There is one exception, though - Kilty Goldfarb, a great fun character who has no real purpose and has apparently just been plonked in the story to add some much needed light.  Or perhaps I was beguiled by the fact that she has the name of a well known firm of solicitors in Leicester West, now I believe defunct.  Spooky, eh?

In summary, not Mina's best by a long chalk (for me, that remains The End of the Wasp Season) but still better than many of its peers.

Even Dogs in the Wild - Ian Rankin

This is the third Rebus and Fox story. I reviewed the first, Standing in Another Man's Grave, a year or so ago and have evidently missed the second, Saints of the Shadow Bible. No matter: Rankin is always able to make his novels sufficient in themselves as well as part of a series.


Rebus is retired and Fox has left Complaints. Somebody is going around murdering people with no apparent connection - Senior Scottish lawyer and peer Lord Minton, a lottery winner up north and Big Ger Cafferty, Edinburgh's gangster emeritus. Actually, the killer takes a pot shot at Cafferty and misses. The cases are linked because each has been given warning, a note shoved their letterbox declaring I'M GOING TO KILL YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID.


Meanwhile a gang of Glasgow thugs are in town looking for a purloined shipment of drugs. A squad of Glasgow cops follows, to which Fox is attached for want of anything better for him to do. Rebus, meanwhile, is the only person Cafferty is willing to talk to. Things develop. The link is obvious from quite early on, sadly predictable and the subject of more or less every contemporary British crime novel nowadays. But what matters here is how the story is unravelled and the strength of the characters.


Which is where the problem lies. Malcolm Fox, no matter how fond of him Rankin has become, no matter how much story he tries to load onto his shoulders, is far too dull to keep pace with Rebus. Any section with him in is instantly forgettable. Rankin is aware of this and relegates him to the gangster subplot. It is Fox who is placed in jeopardy. Unfortunately I was rather hoping it would prove fatal.


Rankin is a great crime novelist. The noir-tinged Scottish procedural is his baby and nobody does it better. But it has become slightly old fashioned. The taste now is for full noir. And he has let his characters grow old, which means their continued involvement in crime is always going to stretch credulity. By incorporating Fox he has diluted the mix. There are so many senior coppers involved here that I lost track. I enjoyed it, but was not blown away. Still, it won't stop me reading the next instalment or seeking out Saints of the Shadow Bible, which, if nothing else, has a much better title.

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.

His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet

His Bloody Project didn't win the 2016 Man Booker Prize (I can't recall what did) but it outsold all the other novels on the shortlist. It purports to be a dossier of documents found by Burnet when researching his Macrae ancestors. The documents relate to the murder of Lachlan Mackenzie of Culduie in Ross-shire in August 1869, for which seventeen year-old Roderick Macrae was hanged in Inverness in September.


The documents consist of a handful of witness statements gathered by local police, the account which Roddy wrote at his solicitor's request whilst awaiting trial, a report (wonderfully entitled Travels in the Border-Lands of Lunacy) by J Bruce Thomson, resident surgeon at Perth prison and leading criminal anthropologist, an account of the trial compiled from contemporary newspapers, and a short epilogue describing Roddy's wretched end.


It's all a fake - or is it? We can't fail to notice that Burnet is himself a Macrae. It is the actuality question which hooks us to begin with. After all, there can't be much of a whodunit here. There are only nine houses in the crofting hamlet and Roddy was seen heading to Mackenzie's with the murder weapons and again, coming back half-an-hour later smothered in fresh blood. More to the point, Roddy has insisted, from that moment forward, that he alone did it. Is he mad? This is the only hope of his solicitor, who commissions the report from Thomson. But there is no sign of madness in Roddy's writing. True, some of his neighbours consider him to be an imbecile, but his schoolmaster wanted to put him forward for a scholarship.


Burnet ingeniously plants a couple of clues that suggest all might not be as it seems. They come together at the end but - another masterstroke - we don't get Roddy's reaction to them because defendants were not at that time allowed to give evidence in court.


Alongside all this we get a fascinating insight into the life of a mid-Victorian Highland crofter, a life that seems unchanged for thousands of years and which, to those trapped in it, must have seemed like it would never changed - renting their land at the whim of the laird and his factor, their only refuge their grim church. One of the great elements here is Burnet's portrait of utter, hopeless despair in Roddy's father John, a man in his forties looking twice his age, armoured in misery.


A tremendous book by an author of prodigious promise. There is an earlier novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, which won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award in 2013, so I must get hold of that. And Burnet's next can't come soon enough for me.

Let It Bleed (Rebus 7) - Ian Rankin

The beauty of ebooks is that you can download one for under £1 in a click. You don't have time or need to speculate. If it's not up to scratch, no biggie. I bought the first Rebus when it came out in paperback, probably in the early Nineties. I still remember how disappointed I was. The plot was nothing much to write home about and the detective's name was just plain silly. I have to say I didn't think much of the early TV adaptations either - the ones starring John Hannah - though they did improve when Ken Stott took over, and Stott remains the model for the Rebus in my head.

Anyway, last week Let it Bleed was on offer and I thought what-the-hey? It's halfway through the series and sure enough Rebus has amassed sufficient character to make time spent in his company enjoyable. The new edition has exclusive extra material from Rankin which for me was best avoided. I really don't need insights into the authorial psyche unless they are incorporated into the main text.

The story itself is very much of its era, the mid-Nineties, when the UK was finally waking up to the legacy of the Thatcher free-marketeers. Entrepreneurship has corrupted every aspect of public life. The legerdemain that Rankin pulls off here is very impressive; he sends us off in pursuit of the usual suspect who turns out to be the wrong suspect. Rankin at this period was not great at the intricacies of the police system (though he is now with his Malcolm Fox series) and Let It Bleed succeeds principally because Rebus is working off the books, which gives him something to lose - his career, the only things he has to keep him from out-and-out alcoholism - if it all goes pear-shaped.

There's something else here which, for me at least, the early books lacked, and that's compassion. The alkies and the junkies and the petty criminals are all real people, the real bad guys - the upwardly mobile - perhaps slightly less so. This enables flashes of wit that really humanise Rebus's world without distracting from the seriousness of the plot.

In short, then, I enjoyed it. The name Rebus is still silly, but after all this time what can Rankin do? I can't help wondering if the Rebus/Fox mash-up Even Dogs in the Wild (2015), presumably a sort of Edinburgh version of Superman meets Batman, might offer me the perfect Rankin experience.

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.

Exile - Denise Mina

Exile is the second of Mina's 'Garnethill' trilogy. The first, not surprisingly, is Garnethill.  The heroine, Maureen, is a damaged, abused young woman with a drug-dealing brother - not unlike Alex Morrow in the later novels.  The setting would seem to be Glasgow, as it should be in Tartan Noir, but actually about half the book takes place in London, which is a tremendous mistake, especially since the people Maureen mixes with there, even the copper with the Met who eventually listens to her, are Glaswegian,

It's a second novel which Mina made doubly hard for herself as the second in a series.  One of Mina's themes is that Scottish women have traditionally been abused by their men.  She wants to say that oppression has made them strong and feisty, a positive message.  Sadly, she undermines herself at every turn, because two of the sleaziest baddies are women and all the white knights who ride to Maureen's rescue are men - Scottish men, at that.

Exile is highly readable.  It is well plotted but, in this Orion paperback, poorly proof-read.  There are far too many characters, especially the ill-defined secondary women, and I often had to pause and wonder who is this when they reappeared much later.  There is one exception, though - Kilty Goldfarb, a great fun character who has no real purpose and has apparently just been plonked in the story to add some much needed light.  Or perhaps I was beguiled by the fact that she has the name of a well known firm of solicitors in Leicester West, now I believe defunct.  Spooky, eh?

In summary, not Mina's best by a long chalk (for me, that remains The End of the Wasp Season) but still better than many of its peers.