In Aberdeen, Scotland, DI Logan McCrae is working with a skeleton crew, as officers across the board are decimated by the flu, while he’s investigating the bombing of a motel that was full of immigrants and holding down the fort at the station too. But things are about to get really crazy when a body is found and a woman goes missing…

It’s the 20th anniversary of this series about Logan McCrae, and this is the 13th book. It’s a series where you can read any one as a standalone or read them in order if you like. The stories are often dark and can be a bit gruesome in places, and they follow the UK police procedural oeuvre, though the twist here in this series is that rather than having a larger than life detective, a la old detective stories like Poirot or even Morse having his idiosyncrasies, we have a very normal, human, down to earth McCrae dealing with a bunch of kooky colleagues. This one is a chunky 600 pages. And this is the first book in this series that I have read. I’m not sure why that is, I think they’ve been on my radar, but I just haven’t picked one up til now.

I was really impressed with the opening pages of this book, or opening few chapters. We start with a young man breaking into the home of a wealthy woman he’s been stalking and is planning on raping, he’s feeling like a big predator. The tension is pretty high as he walks through her home, rifles through her things and we hear her come home. But then things take a turn. Firstly, there’s a knock on the door and a police officer is there. And then the police officer attacks the woman and leaves with her in the trunk of his car. It’s a real bait and switch and an excellent opening scene. Very tense.

I sometimes get frustrated with recent titles that are 600 pages because a lot of the time, they’re that long because they need editing. It can feel really self indulgent on the writer’s part to not murder your darlings, as the saying goes. So this book deserves an honorable mention from me, because I think it uses the 600 pages well. There’s always something going on in this story, there is plenty of plot and moving pieces, and there’s more than one case going on, so there are different developments. There’s also active scenes, with chasing down suspects, sometimes to quite funny effect, other times quite serious. And then there are scenes where the characters are doing everyday police things, and we get to know them through how they interact, and the author makes the effort to make these scenes funny or have a lot of banter in them. So even in the slower moments, the author is at pains to deepen the characters and to entertain us. I appreciated that. This book did not feel long to me.

I get the impression that MacBride really enjoys writing this series, which adds to the enjoyment of reading it. In scenes where the journalist character is our main focus, the writing style changes to have little journalistic touches, like characters age in brackets after their name, like in a news story, or “continued on page…” at the end of those chapters. This made me smile. He tries to choose more interesting words for things, like “dopplering”, and trying to create a little edge and mood in his description. I think this gives these books a unique voice. You definitely know you’re reading a Stuart MacBride book, and I like that. The little uses of Scottish slang and syntax really give it that sense of place as well. Sometimes the language is a little brash and scatological, but it felt more realistic to me with it’s rough and ready characters in Logan’s team, with their different walks of life and outlooks, and the type of work they do.

I think overall this works. Sometimes I felt like Logan McCrae is the long suffering parent to a group of childish adults. There were moments for me when I felt that the side characters were a little bit too cartoonish. The banter had a couple of scenes that felt a little forced. There was one scene where a character was mentioning fictional detectives and it felt like someone had done a google search rather than was naturally listing them. Another starts speaking in a kind of version of Shakespearean language for no real reason. But that said, it didn’t really annoy me. Sometimes we do feel like the only adult in the room in various situations, so it’s relatable, but it was just getting close to that line for me.

There were a few things that I didn’t think landed well. There’s a girl YouTube streamer in this book, and she’s written as being really shallow, callous and having an OnlyFans. This idea that YouTubers, and especially female streamers, being depicted as desperate for attention and narcissistic is very overdone. It’s such an easy trope, and it feels a bit boomer-ish. Most streamers are really nice, and work very hard. They’re business people, even if they have OnlyFans. Sure there are some bad apples, but it felt like lazy writing, kind of cashing in on ignorance about that industry. The second thing was an Australian character that was so cringe. In her chapters we got things compared to the Opera House, talk about kangaroos and kookaburras, a popular Australian idiom was misused, and she refers to the nearest water course as a billabong. I can’t even. It’s rough out here as an Australian.

I think you could also argue, if we’re being a little harsh, that the ending felt a bit soft. The good guys aren’t great at catching the bad guys in this book, on this case, but I think that that’s more that this book is slightly more in the thriller area than the detective, mystery area. There’s some mystery and it gets solved, but the book is also about police life, about how crazy and sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, that line of work can be, and spending time with our characters. I think that works. I was definitely along for the ride.

One of the endorsements on the back of this book is from Lee Child, author of the Reacher novels, and though this is a different style and subject, I feel like that endorsement makes sense. This is a chunky, entertaining read. It has a mystery and different cases, it has some dark moments, but its about taking you on a ride at the same time. It wants to entertain you, and I think it does. I’ll probably seek out more from this author, maybe some previous volumes in this series.

Read It If: Scottish police procedural with darkness and a lot of tension, but also humour and relish, an entertaining read.

Thank you to PGC Books for the ARC of this book for review.