Scottish Crime Fiction

THE MURDER TREE . . . Between the covers

As with most novels in a well established series, there is an extensive back-story here, and it is one than readers new to the books will just have to pick up as they go along. The action is set in Scotland, but in a rather mysterious prologue which seems to have little bearing on subsequent events, we are in London, and it is just before Christmas. A respected cosmetic dentist (married) has taken his mistress out for what should have been a delightful festive meal. Instead, he shatters her by saying that the relationship is over. Tongues are beginning to wag at work, and he needs to sell the flat in which he had installed her in order to pay for his daughters’ school fees. She leaves the restaurant in tears, but then she collapses on a West End street. Has she been stabbed? Poisoned? I am not a huge fan of prologues – they were best left to Frankie Howerd – but it will be while before this enigma is resolved.

Then, in rural Scotland, a corpse is discovered. It is of a man, and he appears to have been disembowelled. Normally DCI Christine Caplan would be on the case, but she is away on a Scottish island, for her daughter Emma’s wedding to the son of a wealthy landed family.

Chapter three sees us somewhere else again, this time a care home on Caplan’s home turf, where stroke victim, eighty two year-old Bernie Williams, is being prepared for – of all things – his engagement party. His soon-to-be fiancée is fellow resident, widow Janet Steele. We also meet Dorothy ‘Doro’ Holland, Bernie’s principal carer. She has a six year-old son with some kind of ailment that can only be treated in America, and Dorothy has no money. Late that evening, Janet’s body is found dead in the garden, with no apparent suspicious marks or symptoms, but how did she circumvent the home’s rigorous security doors? We also learn that Bernie Williams is very wealthy.

Back to the wedding island, an idyllic day is somewhat despoiled when, as the sun sets, a body is gently washed ashore on the incoming tide – and the dead man has a devastating wound across his abdomen. Caplan is In charge of a Major Incident Team based in seaside town of Cronchie, but she gets wind of bad news: her team is going to be broken up and merged with a bigger unit, named Bowbelle, dedicated to fighting a rising drug crisis headed by a man known as The Wasp. One of his favoured transport methods is to case the product in condoms, which are ingested by the carrier. To put it bluntly, instead of waiting for nature to do its work, The Wasp’s lieutenants have recently resorted to a rather more brutal method of accessing their merchandise.

While Caplan has been away, her area seems to have had a spate of strange deaths. There was the disembowelled man, who may have been the victim of a longhorned cow being protective of her calf. There was poor Janet Steele, dead on the night of her engagement. And (where would crime writers be without joggers and dog walkers) who is the elderly man found dead, slumped at the base of a tree, near a forest jogging trail? As if there weren’t enough dead bodies, we also have the mysterious death of Juniper Greene, an elderly recluse, her corpse eventually discovered after some of it had been gnawed away by starving cats. Was she, as rogue journalist Carrie Cowie-Browne suggests, on a witness protection scheme? Caplan is surrounded by death, and struggling not to be submerged beneath its finality.

Just under half way through the novel, we learn the connection between the mysterious prologue and Caplan’s current caseload, and it lies in the identity of the dead dog walker who, as Caplan’s shrewd Sergeant points out, was wearing the wrong kind of shoes for such terrain. What a puzzle! In the end, Caro Ramsey throws all the pieces of the jigsaw up into the air and, when they have settled, reassembles them to create a picture that few readers could have visualised. Although The Murder Tree is much too grim and gritty to resemble anything from The Golden Age, it does share one characteristic of those mysteries, in that several key players are not who they claim to be. The novel is published by Severn House and is available now.

October 15, 2026 0

TOMBSTONING . . . Between the covers

“Dazzling debut” has the tawdry connotations of tabloid alliteration, but sometimes clichés earn their keep. In 2006 we were in the high summer of New Labour but with Gordon Brown scheming away to get the top job, Arsenal moved from Highbury to The Emirates, and Doug Johnstone’s first novel ‘Tombstoning’ was published by Penguin. Successful and highly regarded at the time, it is now republished in a twentieth anniversary edition by Orenda Books.

The best books have central characters we care about, and Johnstone did this in spades. David Lindsay and Nicola Cruikshank were at school together in Arbroath, she a glacial beauty, he a skinny and rather clumsy lad too self-conscious to ask her out. Their final school days were shadowed by tragedy – a fellow school chum called Colin died after plunging from a cliff. Now, fifteen years on, Nicola has been asked by an alumni group to help organise a reunion, and she emails David, finding him on the website of his employer – a struggling web design firm in Edinburgh. Fatefully, David is persuaded by Nicola to rendezvous at the reunion in Arbroath, where he meets one of his former teachers in the pub after a dismally skill-free, but entertaining Third Division football match (Arbroath 1 – Montrose 1)

Mr Bowman reveals that far from being forgotten, Colin Anderson has been adopted by some local teenage boys as a macabre folk hero, and they have taken up the suicidal practice of jumping off the cliffs at high tide in honour of their hero. The activity is known, with bizarre irony, as Tombstoning but, thus far, no-one has died. Doug Johnstone was not the first (nor will he be the last) writer to explore the trope of the school or college reunion. The potential is for old jealousies to surface, historic slights to become even more barbed as the years have gone by, and it becomes probable that teenage rivalries can be revived by men and women now in their thirties, and much more capable of inflicting damage. So it is here.

The ghost of Colin Anderson is, like that if Banquo, the spectre at the feast, and it is not long before things begin to unravel.The mood darkens dramatically, when David receives the news that Gary Spink, an old chum with whom he had gone to the football match, has been found at the foot of the Arbroath cliffs. He and Nicola had been the last people to see him after the three of them had been thrown out of the nightclub hosting the school reunion.

About the half way mark, Johnstone introduces another figure from David’s past – Neil Corrigan. He had been the fourth member of the teenage quartet at school. Now, Colin and Gary are dead, but what became of Neil? Not as bright as his three pals, he was, however, powerfully built and aggressive. He seemed a perfect fit for the Royal Marines, but after serving in the Gulf War, he left to become a policeman. But now? Who Knows? Rumour has it that he has been seen in Arbroath.

Johnstone was brought up in Arbroath, and he describes his home town with affection, but doesn’t spare us the reality of the rather run-down former fishing port and the rusting hulks of trawlers decaying in its harbour. More potently, he describes the human tensions and sense of unease between locals who were never bright or ambitious enough to move away, and former friends like David and Nicola who have seen something of the world outside.

My only quibble with this book is a slight one, and it lies with the introduction, which seems to suggest that the novel is Tartan Noir. Noir, Tartan or otherwise suggests a bleak and monochrome vision of a society devoid of hope and optimism, where human venality tramples on love and human decency. If the writer of the intro wants genuine Noir, then I suggest he reads Derek Raymond’s I Was Dora Suarez. Ted Lewis’s GBH or Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Instead, Tombstoning has romance, genuine affection, decency, optimism and, above all, the power of love. Yes, it has its dark moments and is a terrific thriller, but the bond between David and Nicola is what lifts it above Noir’s slough of despond. This edition will be published by Orenda Books on 26th February.

February 23, 2026 1

DEATH ON SKYE . . . Between the covers

Aline Templeton sets up her stage with admirable directness, and wastes no time introducing us to the characters in her drama. Human Face is (or purports to be) a refugee charity. It has relocated from the south of England to a gloomy Victorian property on Skye and its director, Adam Carnegie is, we soon learn, a wrong ‘un. Beatrice Lacey, a wealthy but emotionally needy supporter of Human Face, had allowed her Surrey home to be used by the charity and is uneasy in its new location, but is in thrall to the messianic Carnegie.

A young woman called Eve is the latest in a series of ‘housekeepers’ at Balnashiel Lodge, and had been promised a British National Insurance number if she behaves herself. Vicky Macdonald, despite marrying a local man, is still regarded as a Sassenach. She does the actual housekeeping at the Lodge.

PC Livvy Murray has been exiled to Skye after being duped by a childhood friend who had been leading a double life in in serious crime. Now, she is stuck in a damp and draughty police house, with her career more or less over before it has started. Kelso Strang is a recently bereaved Edinburgh police officer. He is ex-military, and the son of a Major General. His decision to become a copper has resulted in a huge rift between him and his father.

When Eve is reported missing, Livvy Murray can find nothing suspicious, but refers the matter to her bosses on the mainland. Strang’s boss, seeking to divert him from the trauma of the recent death of his wife in a road accident, sends him up to Skye to investigate.

Aline Templeton has a certain amount of wicked fun at the expense of the unfortunate Beatrice, with her plastic pretend baby, the industrial quantities of chocolate bars she has stashed at strategic points throughout the lodge, and her desperate gullibility. Almost exactly half way through the book, the narrative (which has been ambling along pleasantly enough) explodes into violence, and takes an unexpected turn.

This is the first of a six book series, with an unusual publishing history. All six have appeared between the date of this, 25th August 2025, and the sixth – Death on The Black Isle – on 25th November 2025. Joffe Publishing clearly has a strategy, and I hope it works for them, but is this book any good? Short answer is yes, it’s very readable. The Skye setting is suitably bleak and tempestuous, and the description of the charity scammers rings all too true in a world where ostensibly reputable charities pay obscene amounts of donors’ money to their executives and their TV advertisers.

Were one to summon all the fictional British Detective Inspectors to a convention, the meeting pace would need to be very spacious, and the catering arrangements complex, so does Kelso Strang have sharp enough elbows to make a space for himself? Again, yes. We have come to expect our DIs to be charismatic, damaged and driven, and Strang certainly ticks all three boxes. Death On Skye is available now.

January 1, 2026 0

THE REST IS DEATH . . . Between the covers

In a silky smooth segue from 2024’s For Our Sins, Edinburgh copper Tony McLean has returned from temporary retirement and is asked to investigate an apparently trivial break-in at a Biotech facility. Nothing seems to have been taken, no-one was harmed, so why is a Detective Chief Inspector sent on the job when it would normally be handled by a uniformed Sergeant? The answer is simple. Drake Biotech is owned and funded by billion are Nathanial Drake, who just happens to be on WhatsApp terms with Scotland’s First Minister.

When an old school chum approaches DI Janie Harrison with a request to look, for her missing boyfriend, a Serbian carpenter, Janie does a perfunctory search, but assumes the man has gone to ply his trade elsewhere. She has logged the photos from her chum’s phone, and is horrified to find, that when she is called out to woodland where a hastily buried body has been found, the remains are that of Vaclav Mihailovic.When the autopsy is carried out on the Serbian, the pathologist is both baffled and shocked. The unfortunate man is opened up, but there is no stench of decay. It seems that the gut bacteria that continue working away after the heart stops beating are mysteriously absent. There is no bloating and no breakdown of tissue.

Halfway through the book, Oswald escalates and complicates the narrative. First, the driver of the van that took the intruders to Blake Biotech is identified, but then rapidly disappears. McLean suspects he is working for an external intelligence agency. A professional protester called Sanderson, believed to be one of the Biotech vandals is found sitting on a park bench, stone dead. Then the bodies of both Sanderson and Mihailovic are stolen from the city mortuary. Long time fans of the Tony McLean novels have become accustomed to an element of the supernatural appearing in the narrative. Here, it comes in page one, but it is another 60 pages before we realise the relevance to Nathaniel Drake and his interests.

McLean ponders the situation:

“We’ve got a break-in at the lab by animal rights activists who turn out to be a diversion for some MI5 spook doing God knows what. One of the team turns up dead in the park, looking like he’s not eaten in months and shouldn’t have had the strength to wield a spray can, let alone smash up a lab. I’d really like to know what he died from, just in case I’ve got a new disease about to spread through the city.

But someone breaks into the mortuary and steals his body before the pathologist can have a proper look. And whoever does that has the ability to break the servers of a sophisticated security services company to order.

A company that, it turns out, is a fully owned subsidiary of Drake Corporation, whose labs were broken into. And am I going round in circles?”

Within the CriFi genre, police procedural investigations are not natural bedfellows with the paranormal. The late Phil Rickman made it work – in spades – and James Oswald does a pretty good job. He certainly pushes the boundaries here, and gives us a finale with an archetypal mad professor locked in a life or death struggle with McLean, Harrison, and the mummified heart of a man who was court magus to Vlad Dracul in the medieval Carpathian Mountains. All this aside, Oswald has given us a copper with instincts, compassion and humanity, coupled with the inner steel required to do what can often be a truly horrible job. The Rest is Death is published by Headline, and is available now.

December 5, 2025 0

FOR OUR SINS . . . Between the covers

Edinburgh, the present day. A man is found dead in near-derelict church, his head crushed by a collapsed wall. His wallet reveals that he was Kenneth Morgan, an elderly ex-criminal who had been living quietly on his own since coming out of jail five years earlier. In charge of the case is Detective Sergeant Janie Harrison, who remains central to the story, despite the distant presence of her former boss, Tony McLean who has retired from the force. McLean is contacted by investigative journalist Jo Dalgliesh, who asks him to meet a middle-aged man, Robert Murphy who, as a child, was the victim of sexual abuse by his parish priest. The priest was murdered in what appeared to be an interrupted robbery of church silver. Murphy has the strangest of tales to tell.

“I was a witness. And nobody listened to me when I told them what he’d done. And if he died, then how come I saw him on the street just a few weeks ago?”.

When another elderly man is found dead on the floor of a church, this time definitely by foul play, the police realise they have something strange on their hands. Both men were long-term associates of notorious gang boss, Archibald Seagram, a man who has remained conspicuously untainted by criminal convictions, despite being at the helm of an organisation responsible for much of the city’s serious crime for decades.

Meanwhile, Tony McLean is making the best of his ‘retirement’ and dutifully looking after his girlfriend Emma, who is slowly recovering from a stroke. He is acutely aware, however, that with the lack of mental and intellectual challenge that his job provided, One of the ‘ever presents’ in the excellent Tony McLean series is the transvestite spiritual medium Madam Rose, and it is his/her intervention that finally persuaded our man to do what his inner soul has been pressing him to do for months – offer himself back to Police Scotland.his life seems hollow and empty of purpose. Softly, softly, James Oswald is preparing us for some kind of comeback.

Every good police procedural novel needs a bad cop, and few are as loathsome as Detective Superintendent Pete Nelson. Detective Sergeant Jamie Harrison is at the core of the first half of this book, and Nelson is ‘on her case’ in all manner of ways, from professional vindictiveness to drunken groping in the pub. McLean’s former office still lacks a new tenant, and the department is worryingly understaffed, and so he returns, ostensibly just to help with this particular investigation.What we know, as readers, thanks to the short and intermittent flashbacks to 1980s, seen through the eyes of teenage altar boys, is that there is a religious aspect to this case and, specifically, connected to the Roman Catholic church.

McLean is one of the better fictional coppers in British crime fiction, and Oswald is a fine writer. Although McLean’s return to work is, to a degree, successful, we are left with no neat and conclusive answer to the reason why the three former criminals died. Nor do we learn why the severely disturbed Robert Murphy killed them, and his conviction that his church vestry abuser is still out and about is never explained, except perhaps because of his own mental state – or something paranormal has happened. For Our Sins was published by Headline in 2024, and there will be a new Tony McLean novel later this month.

November 16, 2025 0

THE WINTER DEAD… Between the covers

The best Scottish crime fiction novels seem to be polarised between noirish grit and grunge on the mean streets of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and more windswept tales set on rocky coasts and misty moors. The Winter Dead belongs in the latter category. DI Shona Oliver is in charge of a large rural beat which includes the wild shores of Dumfries and Galloway. Her husband, Robert, is doing time for financial fraud, leaving her to do her day job while trying to keep their guesthouse business solvent.

A chance discovery (a bloodstained hammer discarded within a lorry load of firewood) presents a massive challenge which forces her to examine the integrity of people she has regarded as being valued friends. Shona also a seasoned member of the local lifeboat crew, and the over-arching sense of a community surviving in spite of the awful weather is reinforced in the early pages when Shona and her colleagues rescue a windsurfer battered against an unforgiving granite cliff by a force ten gale. The elemental theme continues as, following up the bloodstained hammer, Shona and a mountain rescue team are forced to rough it in an isolated visitor centre while searching for a missing forest Ranger.

The snow storm does its worst, and destroys any forensic traces, but when the missing man – John MacFarlane – is found miles away, not only is the jigsaw jumbled up, but several of its pieces go missing.it is a well established trope of police novels that the central DI, already knee-deep and floundering in the riptide of a perplexing investigation, must also be plagued by family problems. Here, not only does Shona Oliver have her husband glumly sitting in jail, but she hears disturbing news of daughter Becca, away at university in Glasgow. Becca’s flatmate, Jack Rutherford, has been stabbed during an attempted phone snatch, and his injuries are life threatening.

To add to the rich tapestry of misdeeds Shona is tasked with investigating, a local petty crook has handed in something he has ‘found’. It is a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child, no bigger than a A4 sheet, but exquisite. She traces its recent provenance, but is it the original, or a saleroom copy?

A mixture of persistence and a touch of good luck results in something of a revelation about the murder of John MacFarlane, and it links the crime to an event decades earlier, in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Shona once again finds herself leading a manhunt, this time in the wintry malevolence of Dalgeddie Forest.

“As they went further from the track, the snow lay not like a decorative Christmas dusting, but like deep ash from some catastrophic fire. The branches of the fir swept down to the ground. The dark spaces enclosed by their grasp brought simultaneously a craving for sanctuary and a sense of her own vulnerability where every shadow seemed to hide a human shape. Her footsteps were impossibly loud. The deep powder squeaked and groaned, compacting under each step.”

The author who, like her heroine, is also part of a volunteer lifeboat crew, seamlessly weaves the different strands of the plot together, and Shona’s professional reputation is enhanced. She cannot rest easy, however, as fate has one dramatic personal surprise for her. This vivid and intriguing thriller will be published by Canelo Crime on 6th November.

November 3, 2025 0

THE FRACTURE . . . Between the covers

Blake Glover – BG to his friends – is a fifty-something taxi driver in his home town,the bleak fishing port of Fraserborough on Scotland’s north east coast. In a former life he was a police officer on the mean streets of Glasgow. His career ended after a messy attempt – involving planted evidence – to bring drug boss Mitch Campbell to justice. Now, Campbell has been arrested and tried, legitimately, and is awaiting sentence in Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie prison. Glover is about to find out that Campbell has long reach, despite his incarceration.

The book begins, however, with a dramatic and, apparently, unconnected scene. Out on the desolate Fraserborough shoreline, a homeless alcoholic guzzles his last few mouthfuls of ‘Buckie’ (Buckfast tonic wine) but sees something perturbing out there in the darkness. A man has has walked out onto the beach, taken off his clothes, shoes and socks, and walked out into the white horses of the tide. The drunk staggers towards the beach calling out, but he is too late; the man has disappeared. The strange event has a temporarily sobering effect on the drunk, and he returns to the town and reports what he has seen.

Meanwhile, attending the funeral of an elderly lady he knew from childhood, Glover notices something disturbing. In the teeth of a furious and drenching storm, one of the pallbearers loses control of his rope lowering the coffin into the grave. That corner of the coffin thuds into the earth – and splits. The gravediggers in the mini JCB furiously pile the earth on top of the coffin before Glover can investigate, but he drives away from the churchyard trying to make sense of what he saw. He learns that in the darker corners of the funeral business it is not unheard of for relatives to order and pay for a top of the range oak coffin, only for the corpse to be switched to a more fragile plywood version at the last minute.

The man on the beach left his wallet with his clothes and has been identified as Ray Cocklestone, a former local farmer. He is classed, at least for now, a missing person, but few locals think it will be long before he is declared a suicide. Glover is interviewed by the police, as he may have been one of the last people to have talked to Cocklestone, having taken him in his taxi from his home to a local pub.

Morgan Cry (pen name of Gordon Brown, but no, not that one) creates an intriguing and, in the end, deeply sinister plot line which links the mystery of the splitting coffin and the disappearance of Ray Cocklestone with the truly dreadful things that take place courtesy of The Dark Web and the anonymity it gives its users. The Mitch Campbell storyline develops separately, and is one which comes to threaten not only Glover’s relatively modest current career, but his freedom and, perhaps, his life itself.

There are two central characters in the novel. One is the flawed, but likeable Glover. His lifestyle is certainly destructive, at least from a dietary point of view. He exists on industrial quantities of service station pasties and Mars bars, washed down with copious draughts of that peculiar Scottish delicacy, Iran-Bru. His taxi driver life is a miasma of unwashed passengers and the sickly scent of yet another air-freshener dangling from the rear view mirror. The other imposing presence in the book is Fraseborough itself. The town is frequently battered by the storms swirling in from the North Sea. The reluctant hedgerows and trees dolefully wear their permanent Christmas decorations of discarded plastic bags and wrappers from last night’s fish supper. The pubs, the houses, the leisure centres and the rain washed supermarket car parks are all bleak enough, but the people of the town are lovingly painted for the most part, with their impenetrable Aberdeenshire accents and their abiding love of gossip. The Fracture will be published by Severn House on 4th November.

October 31, 2025 0

THIS HOUSE OF BURNING BONES . . . Between the covers

It has been a while since I read one of the Logan McRae books, and I am delighted to return to the series. Things have changed, though. McRae’s one-time boss, the foul mouthed Roberta Steel, has been reduced to the ranks after planting evidence in a rape trial. Now, things are turned on their head, McRae is Steel’s boss, and it is not a comfortable arrangement.

The McRae novels are, in my reading experience, unique in their blend of camp comedy, criminality at its most grisly and that essential sense that we have, in the person of DI Logan McRae, a serious copper with an unblemished sense of right and wrong. This novel starts with comedy, and an attempt by the Aberdeen cops to nail a man called Charles MacGarioch, who is suspected of leading an arson attack on a hotel full of asylum seekers. He eventually escapes in a hijacked ice-cream van, much to the frustration of McRae and the Keystone pursuers. After a chase that makes the famous scene in Bullitt look like the London to Brighton Rally, the van ends up in the River Don. The ice-cream man is rescued and is in a serious condition, but of MacGarioch there is no sign.

As the search for MacGarioch continues, we know something that McRae and his colleagues don’t. A burglar/peeping tom called Andrew Shaw (who lives with his mum, naturally) has broken into the house of Natasha Agapova, the new editor of an ailing local paper. Ms Agapova returns unexpectedly, but before she can even kick off her Laboutins, she is attacked and abducted by a man claiming to be Detective Sergeant Davis. And Andrew has captured the proceedings on his night vision head- worn camera.

When a beaten body is found in Aberdeen’s other river – the Dee – expectations are that Charles MacGarioch has met a watery end, but the corpse is that of Andrew Shaw. The few remaining staff at the once august Aberdeen Examiner have been queuing up outside the office of the new editor, Ms Agapova, to argue for their jobs, but where is she? It isn’t until senior journalist Colin Miller decides to go round to Agapova’s expensive but tasteless house to give her a piece of his mind that, finding the door unlocked, Miller finds scenes of a violent struggle and bloodstains – now dark and dried – but unmistakable. He calls 999.

MacBride is one of the better comedy writers within the CriFi genre. How about this gem?

“PC Ian Shand looked as if he’d been made by four-year-olds out of knotted string and old cat hair. And when he opened his mouth, every single one of his teeth pointed in a different direction.”

As we move through the book MacBride takes aim at all manner of institutions. In no particular order, the NHS, school Parents’ Evenings, the decline of Aberdeen, urban social architecture, preposterous management-speak and that strange public grief which involves plastic flowers, balloons and semi-literate messages of sympathy draped on railings and lamp-posts. Each one takes a fatal bullet.

From ‘Early Doors’ in this relentlessly entertaining novel, we have been aware that Natasha Agapova has been held captive in a remote farm, by ‘Detective Sergeant Davis’. The big question is, of course concerns his real identity. If he isn’t an actual policeman, then who is he? Of course, we eventually learn who is, thanks in no small measure to McRae’s sidekick DC “Tufty” Quirrel. I am not sure who he irritated more, Logan McRae or me, but he is certainly a clever wee lad. The House of Burning Bones was published by Macmillan on 25th May.

June 23, 2025 0

WHISPERS OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Lin Anderson’s battle-hardened forensic investigator Dr Rhona MacLeod returns to make another journey through the grisly physical mayhem that some human beings inflict on others. In a disused and vandalised farmhouse in Glasgow’s Elder Park, a man’s body has been found. His eyes and mouth have been sewn shut and, strapped to a metal chair, he has been thrown through an upstairs window. A trio of teenage scallies have been using the old building as a base for their minor law-breaking, and they are the first people to see the body,

In another part of the city, an American film crew have informed the police that their leading man is missing. With the assistance of DS McNab, who has interviewed the movie-makers, Rhona MacLeod becomes involved, and wonders if the missing actor is the mutilated corpse found in the park.

At the very beginning of the book Lin Anderson introduces what develops into a parallel plot thread. A woman called Marnie Aitken has served six years in prison for the murder of her four year-old daughter, Tizzy, despite the fact that no trace of Tizzy, dead or alive, has ever been found. Marnie is known to Rhona MacLeod, and to her colleague, psychiatrist Professor Magnus Pirie. On her release, Marnie – abused as a child and as a young woman – is placed in sheltered accommodation. She goes missing. but not before sending a bizarre gift to Rhona. It is a beautifully sewn and knitted doll, in the likeness of a young Highland dancer. Rhona realises its significance, as Tizzy Aitken was a promising dancer, but she is also appalled to see that the doll’s lips have been sewn shut with black thread. What message is Marnie sending?

Marnie is located at her old cottage on the Rosneath Peninsula, and but she returns to Glasgow, where the police find that she is linked – albeit at a tangent – the the killing of the man in Elder Park. Meanwhile, DS McNab – who was involved in the original investigation into Tizzy’s disappearance, but kicked off the case – has realised that the script and screenplay of the film – now abandoned after the disappearance of its star – is inextricably tangled up with the murder.

Right from the beginning of the novel, we know that Marnie still talks to Tizzy, and Tizzy still talks to her. Is this merely, as Magnus Pirie suggests, a grieving woman’s way of coping with her loss? Or is it something else? On the first page of the book, Marnie looks out of the window:

“It was at that moment the figure of a girl, dressed in a kilt and blue velvet jacket, arrived to tramp across the snow in front of the main gate. As though sensing someone watching, the girl stopped and turned to look over at her. Marnie stood transfixed, then shut her eyes, her heart hammering. ‘She’s not real. It’s a waking nightmare. When I look again, she won’t be there.’
And she was right.
When Marnie forced her eyes open, the figure had gone, or more likely, it had never been there in the first place except there were footprints in the snow to prove otherwise.”

When Rhona visits Marnie’s seaside cottage, she walks down to the beach where Tizzy used to go with her mother:

“The snow at sea level had gone and the muddy ruts were studded with puddles and the shape of footsteps leading both ways. Her forensic eye noted three in particular, ranging in size: a small childlike print, a medium one and a large one, going in both directions.”

Lin Anderson doesn’t resolve this for us. She leaves us to draw our conclusions, and I suppose it depends on how feel about Hamlet’s oft-quoted words to Horatio in Act 1 Scene 5 of the celebrated play. The police procedural part of this novel plays out in the favour of the good guys, but aside from this, Lin Anderson has written a thoughtful and moving account of the nature of grief, and the indelible legacy that the death of a child bequeaths. Whispers of The Dead was published by Macmillan on 1st August.