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.
This is a new police procedural from Stuart MacBride (left) and it introduces Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh. Her beat is the fictional town of Oldcastle (not to be confused with the actual city of Oldcastle, which lies between Aberdeen and Dundee). Aberdeen, of course, is where DS Logan McRae operated in the hugely successful earlier series from MacBride. Also, DS McVeigh comes across – to me at any rate – as a younger version of McRae’s boss, the foul-mouthed and acerbic DCI Roberta Steel. McVeigh is equally sharp tempered, and similarly indisposed to suffer fools gladly.
As the search for The Bloodsmith continues, and Lucy McVeigh struggles to keep abreast of that investigation, as well as her battle with the Black family and coping with the mental agonies of Benedict Strachan, MacBride treats us to his signature mixture of Noir, visceral horror and bleak humour. Even though his Oldcastle is a fictional place, it is vividly brought to life to the extent that I would not be in the least surprised if the author has a map of the place hanging on the wall of his writing room. The situation becomes ever more complex for Lucy McVeigh when she learns there is a connection between the murdered former policeman and Benedict Strachan. That connection is a prestigious and exclusive independent school, known colloquially as St Nicks’s. When she visits the school, she unearths more questions than answers.
It seems like an eternity since I read a Stuart MacBride (right) novel, and it was back in his Logan McRae days. The last of those was All That’s Dead (2019) but this might be the start of a new police procedural series featuring Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh. We are once more in Aberdeen, and a serial killer known as The Bloodsmith is doing his grisly business, McVeigh’s police team, working under the name Operation Maypole, having failed to get close to the killer. To add to her problems, she has to deal with a young man who, at the age of eleven, inexplicably killed a homeless man. He served his time, and now is out and about again – and convinced that a mysterious ‘they’ are out to kill him. Does McVeigh ignore him and concentrate on finding The Bloodsmith, or could she have another potential maniac on her books? No Less The Devil will be published by Bantam Press 
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