12 posts tagged “scotland”
On one level this novel is an entertaining, light-hearted and fast-moving romp, relating how Krissie Donald, protagonist of DEAD LOVELY, becomes a probation officer, encounters a client, Jeremy, who is accused of killing his mother-in-law, feels sorry for him and tries to prove him innocent. This process not only involves finding evidence and arguments to help the defence lawyer (not exactly part of her job description) but also stimulates Krissie to try to find out who did the dirty deed if not Jeremy. There's plenty of fizz and pace to this plot, as the author wittily skewers all kinds of modern targets among the absentee-management and politically correct, training-course culture of today, where nobody understands responsibility but they know how to check boxes recording performance targets.
My enjoyment of this well-written novel, however, was marred by two aspects that made me uncomfortable. One is Krissie's domestic life. The reader is clearly meant to identify and sympathise with Krissie, who is presented as a naïve, warm-hearted, ditzy woman, who can't be blamed for all the things that go wrong in her life. I just could not go along with that, particularly where her young son Robbie is concerned. For example, as the book opens, Krissie and her patient boyfriend Chas have spent a couple of years recovering from the events of DEAD LOVELY living with and being looked after by Krissie's parents. They all decide it would be good for the young family to be independent, so Chas, Krissie and Robbie move back into Krissie's flat and she starts a new job as the community protection (aka probation) officer. A lot is made of how much Krissie hates leaving Robbie on her first day at work (Chas is looking after him while she's there). Similarly, she does not particularly like her workmates. However, she readily accepts an invitation to go to the pub with them in the evening, leaving Chas to cope with all the parenting and returning home very late without a care. This is definitely not endearing behaviour, and I found myself constantly wrong-footed in finding Krissie's actions increasingly less likeable as the book wore on (yes, she gets much worse than this), yet the author relentlessly presents her as a romantic, endearingly cute heroine who deserves our sympathy at the expense of her little son and the rest of her family.
The other main aspect I found difficult about the book was the depiction of the families of Jeremy (the accused murderer) and Amanda (his manicurist wife). Are these portrayals intended to be satires of modern life and relationships? The relationship between Amanda and her birth mother immediately after their reunion is the most extreme example of the author's ability to push way beyond anything remotely funny into something utterly ghastly, but not acknowledged as such with even so much as a blink or change of pace.
Although I enjoyed this book and found many parts of it funny, its ambiguities defeated me in the sense that I could not work out how much is intentional on the part of the author. As a mystery novel, there are some gaping inconsistencies in the plot (when the truth of the murder is eventually revealed) that really should have been addressed in a final revision.
Even with these flaws, and despite my queasy distaste for several of the relationships and set-pieces, I admire the author for creating situations that are so over-the-top awful yet told in a teen-novel, "Princess Diaries" style that allows her to go even further than is bearable without making the reader put down the book in disgust. I still don't know if I like or loathe Krissie for her blithe refusal to take responsibility for anything in her personal life or for her own feelings - a couple of hints indicate that the childhood trauma described in DEAD LOVELY is at the root of it, so this may be addressed in future novels - or it may be just how Krissie is. If nothing else, Helen Fitzgerald is certainly different, and does not shrink from depicting a warts-and-all world and characters, all with good humour and a light, readable touch.
I don't think I have ever read a book quite like this one before, and it slips down a treat - like an ice-cream with a vindaloo centre. Chick-lit noir has truly arrived in the shape of DEAD LOVELY, in which social worker Krissie conceives a child in the toilets of a night club in Ibiza with an apparently attractive stranger - who rapidly loses his appeal when Krissie comes down from her high and sees that the stars are really dust mites or worse.
Returning to her native Glasgow, Robbie (Krissie's baby) soon arrives and changes her comfortable, free-wheeling, single lifestyle by introducing responsibility, a concept as alien to Krissie as ballooning would be to a shark, despite her professional role as assessing parental suitability among the city's many dispossessed.
Helen Fitzgerald treads a clever balancing act between edgy, trendy noir and sympathy with her heroine's predicament. The first part of the story is told through Krissie's eyes, but when her mothering skills become truly appalling, we shift to seeing her from the perspective of other characters, and are hence reassured that she has a heart of gold.
The plot, such as it is, involves a hiking holiday with Krissie's two best friends, Sarah, a childhood schoolmate, and Kyle, a student flatmate who fancies her, and she him, but he is now married to Sarah. A further complication is Chas, the third student flatmate who has been in prison for ten years for apparently randomly attacking a man with a shopping trolley and refusing to provide any reason to the police.
Predictably, the holiday is a disaster, not only ending prematurely in the sense of the characters returning home early, but in the sense that is final for one of them - but which? The reader is kept guessing in some clever twists and turns. Krissie's panic at how to cope with the inevitable collapse of the creaking house of cards of her life, and her inability to cope with her baby, add to the tension of the holiday's hideous climax.
This book is very funny. It is hard to make a joke of parental neglect, but somehow Helen Fitzgerald manages it in this scurrilous but good-natured, easy-reading tale. Yes, the eventual ending is somewhat contrived and rather too "romance genre" for my taste, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hectic and chaotic ride, and recommend this refreshing voice for anyone who fancies something a bit different.
The third in Ann Cleeves' "Shetland quartet" (earlier volumes are the prizewinning RAVEN BLACK and the equally impressive WHITE NIGHTS) is a very satisfying read. This series is growing in maturity; RED BONES seems to me to have an added depth in portrayal of the characters (familiar from previous books as well as new to this volume) and their environment, as well as a more confident plot. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that the author focuses here on only two regulars, the police detective Jimmy Perez and his slightly slow subordinate, Sandy Wilson. Jimmy's partner, Fran, and her daughter Cassie, are in London for most of RED BONES, and other detectives, including Roy Taylor from Inverness, do not make an appearance.
The main part of the book is set on the island of Whalsay, where Sandy and his family come from. Two young students are conducting an archaeological dig on a small croft owned by Mima Wilson, Sandy's widowed grandmother. The old lady is unconventional and gets on well with the young women, until the students discover a skull and some bones buried on the property. Hattie, one of the students, is tremendously excited by the find as she believes it will vindicate her theory that there was a well-established old trading route, confirming the island a powerful commercial force in its time.
However, the discovery of the bones sparks not one, but two, tragedies, which Jimmy and Sandy increasingly come to feel were not accidental. As their investigation continues, we learn more about the Wilson family as well as their neighbours the Coulsens: their role in the "Shetland bus" in the Second World War in which the islanders helped members of the Norwegian resistance to escape from the Nazis; and the tensions between the men who became rich by working on the fishing boats compared with those and their families who have to scrabble around for a living on the unforgiving land.
Much of the appeal of this book lies in the wonderfully conveyed sense of place, the convincingly sympathetic portrayal of a way of life, and astute characterisation. But as well as these elements, there is a good solid mystery plot: I worked out parts of it before any revelations, but found the whole satisfyingly tied together in ways that I had not anticipated. It was sad to me that, in an echo of the first in this series, RAVEN BLACK, the two most interesting and likeable characters in the book (excepting the sweet Sandy and the rather dreamily lovely Jimmy) were the victims: the second of these is particularly upsetting. But of course, the extent of the tragedy also makes the reader more involved in desiring the police to discover the perpetrator(s) of the crime. RED BONES is an excellent, absorbing, slow-burn of a book.
Jamie Worth is the Glasgow policeman in the triangle at the centre of THE TWILIGHT TIME, Karen Campbell's impressive, police-procedural first novel. In the second book in the series, AFTER THE FIRE, Jamie trains as a firearms officer and (this is not giving anything away) shoots and kills a girl as she is running from her tenement home, allegedly after erratically shooting a gun at innocent passers-by in the street below.
The novel explores in-depth the events leading up to the night of the shooting, Jamie's trial and his subsequent imprisonment. (Again, this is not giving anything away as these events are revealed at the start of the book, the first part of which is told in flashback.) We learn in minute detail about Jamie's experiences of being let down by the police force, the legal system and his presumed friends and colleagues; and experience his wife Cath's perspective as the mother of their two young children. At times, the first half of this book is slow, even tedious - partly for me because I found it difficult to identify or sympathise with Jamie or Cath. The author is also deliberately ambiguous about who is at "fault" - it is clear that Jamie has shot the girl, so the outcome of the court case is only one aspect of the story - his emotional and ethical responses are also central to the mix.
The author was herself a policewoman for many years, and this experience provides a framework that seems deeply authentic - not just in the scenes involving the criminal justice system, but in the descriptions of the media's behaviour and the poignant excerpts throughout the book that movingly describe the short, tragic life of the young victim. The author goes where few would wish to travel, in following Jamie right through his prison sentence and all the associated petty deprivations and cruel meanness. Society forgets about an individual after he or she has been convicted for a crime, but the author is on a crusade not only to show up the injustices and corruption inherent in the prison system, but also to demonstrate that far from providing a punishment followed by rehabilitation, it destroys those who are in it by breaking them mentally and/or physically.
Anna Cameron is an apparently successful, graduate-entrant policewoman whose career nearly came unstuck in THE TWILIGHT TIME. At the start of AFTER THE FIRE, she is attending a UN conference in New York, where she meets prosecutor David Millar; due to his keenness on her and his charming good nature, she forms an uneasy relationship with him. Anna returns to Scotland on discovering what has happened to Jamie, who is her former lover, convinced of his innocence and determined to prove it. Despite her offers of help being violently rejected by a jealous Cath, she is determined to vindicate Jamie.
Gradually, Cath and Jamie separately transcend their challenging situation: in his case, the violence and other abuses of prison, and in hers, of coping with young children, a mortgage, being broke and friendless. They both discover what is really important, and shrug off many of their earlier (frankly boring!) attitudes and values. But it seems a distant hope as to whether Anna can (or will go the full distance to) uncover any evidence to help Jamie, or even if so, can turn it to his advantage. Assuming you have already read THE TWILIGHT TIME, AFTER THE FIRE is a rewarding book. The author does not try to make her characters likeable or pander to the reader; she has a serious, campaigning point to make. This is a refreshing combination, and by the end, one feels that some of the characters have really been put through everything that modern life can throw at them, and have emerged the stronger for it. I'm very much looking forward to reading more by this talented, thoughtful author.
Val McDermid is back with a stand-alone novel, A Darker Domain- though some of the minor characters have appeared in other books, most notably the forensic archaeologist River Wilde who was first encountered in The Grave Tattoo. The Darker Domain is an exiting, well-constructed novel that is a perfect showcase for the author's considerable talents. Like The Grave Tattoo, A Darker Domain is one of the author's "mainstream" books, in other words there are no gory details, unlike some of her other output.
DI Karen Pirie is in charge of the Fife police cold-case unit. She's a woman of a certain age and weight, and an attractive protagonist - confident, professional, but with a sufficient touch of introspection and self-awareness to make her interesting. She's presented with two apparently unconnected cases: first, that of a miner who disappeared one night during the terrible strike in the 1980s which ruined an industry, the local community, and whose effects are still felt today. The man's daughter wants Karen to find him because her son is dying of a rare blood disease, and she's urgently seeking donors. Karen's second case is that of the missing grandson of the local laird and stinkingly rich magnate Broderick Grant. About 20 years ago, Grant's daughter and baby son were kidnapped and ransomed: in a botched attempt to rescue them, the daughter was killed and the kidnappers disappeared with the ransom and the baby (presumably). Now, a journalist has uncovered new evidence during a holiday in Italy, and convinces Grant to let her work on the case. Because the police were involved in the kidnapping disaster, and because the man in charge, Lawson, was subsequently imprisoned for murder (a previous case of Karen's, though I don't think that this has been recorded in a book), and because he's bloody-minded and arrogant, Grant is keen to keep the police out of it this time round.
The first two-thirds of the book are gripping. Val McDermid is a superb storyteller and her account of the miner's strike is harrowing, moving and authentic. The novel is unfalteringly sure-footed with the many switches between the cases, time, and people's perspectives. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt that in the last part of the book the tension was not maintained quite to the pitch of the earlier parts, perhaps partly because I had guessed what was going on in both stories, and the ending is a little rushed. However, there are a few surprises still in store, and although the two main themes are pretty downbeat to the bitter end, there are optimistic outcomes to a couple of subplots. One of the things I appreciated most about the book is the character of Karen Pirie - I like her, her attitudes, the way she deals with colleagues above and below her in the hierarchy - and I hope to read more about her in future.
THE TWILIGHT TIME is an assured, seemingly authentic, noir-laden police procedural, set in Glasgow. The author is an ex-police officer, and this is her first novel. I'm impressed.
Sergeant Anna Cameron arrives to take charge of the "Fixit" squad, a fast-response team assigned to deal with assorted street crime: mainly car and shop theft, vandalism, muggings and, along "the Drag", drug addiction and prostitution. Anna has only a few constables under her command so the team is overwhelmed, regularly working overtime and with nowhere near enough cells, meaning they have to ascribe a pecking order to the crimes they choose to deal with. Anna's boss, Rankin, whose name is possibly a nod towards a famous Scottish crime novelist, insists that the Drag is regularly cleaned out. Anna's team, a mix of the lazy and the insubordinate, prove hard for her, a middle-class graduate who wears expensive beige and has a beautiful hair cut, to control as they regularly mock her and make insinuating remarks.
Anna's personal life is a bit of a mess, to say the least. Her father died when she was young; her mother remarried and now lives in Spain, playing golf and ignoring her daughter. Anna is having an affair with an absent, very married, senior officer, who sounds utterly ghastly. She also discovers that her ex-love Jamie, with whom she had an affair while they were cadets, is not only married to the woman he dumped Anna for and has had a baby with her, but is also one of the constables under her command. Anna does a good, professional job, trying to sort out the detritus of crime fuelled by drink, drugs, poverty and boredom. Some of these scenes provide telling details of what it really must be like for the front-line police to try to keep society civilised in overwhelmingly degrading and sickening circumstances without sinking down into the mire - one scene in which Anna has to find a jailed prostitute's hidden stash of roll-ups is nauseatingly telling. How can the police stay above all of this squalor? Many of them cannot, and resort to insensitivity and worse.
Anna's main concern is to apprehend someone who is attacking prostitutes and slashing their faces. At the same time, she meets an elderly Polish man who has been subjected to racial abuse. When the man is found dead, Anna takes it hard. Then, on night duty, she is attacked, presumably by the slasher, and pushed downstairs. She saves her colleague Jamie's life (probably) in the process, but is badly injured and is hospitalised.
The book slightly loses track in this middle section, in which Anna goes to pieces and embarks on an off-the-record investigation into the Polish man's death, using Jamie's wife Cath, Anna's ex-rival and an ex-police constable herself, to help her. Things soon go wrong and Anna is up for disciplinary action. Jamie and she are tempted to rekindle their relationship while Cath struggles with weight problems, post-natal depression and the sheer exhaustion of looking after a baby while her husband is out drinking at nights and is often unsympathetic to her woes.
Despite the rather busy and less realistic plot in the last third of the novel, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and like the character of Anna very much. She is no heroine, she's a normal person who has entered a profession where far too much is expected in terms of crippling workload and ghastly situations that need cleaning up; she's existing in a culture where mockery and prejudice are rampant; and she has little emotional support. The author also takes an interesting angle in exploring various emotional minefields that exist between Cath and Anna (and to a lesser extent, Jamie. This book is not sympathetic to men, on the whole).
In the end, Anna pretty much muddles through, and not only is there a believable solution of sorts to more than one of the criminal scenarios that have gone before, but she seems to have manoeuvred herself into a reasonably good career position for the future. This book certainly deserves its cover endorsement from Kate Atkinson: "I loved it. A great original character and the plot fairly whizzes along".
Ian Rankin dedicates his seventeenth John Rebus novel "to everyone who was in Edinburgh on 2 July 2003". The first half of the book is a pacy, punchy read, set against the backdrop of the G8 summit held in Scotland that year. In the first chapter, Mickey, Rebus's wayward younger brother whom regular readers will remember from the earliest books in the series, is barely in his coffin when John's close colleague Siobhan Clarke calls to let him know that there is a break in a six-week-old murder case.
The victim, Cyril Colliar, was an unpleasant criminal who worked for Rebus's nemesis, "Big Ger" Cafferty. Although the police aren't exactly busting a gut to find Colliar's killer, Cafferty wants vengeance, if only to demonstrate his clout in the dog-eats-dog criminal fraternity. Clarke's breakthrough discovery of clothes from three victims at a remote spot called Clootie Well leads her and Rebus to realise that a serial killer may be at work - what is more, a killer who targets sex offenders, possibly via a website called Beastwatch.
While Rebus and Clarke are trying to find a link between the victims, another tragedy occurs: an idealistic young MP falls from the walls of Edinburgh Castle during a pre-G8 dinner. The detectives are blocked from investigating the apparent suicide by Special Branch, who claim jurisdiction. Rebus is suspicious, not least because of the involvement of party donor and arms dealer Richard Pennen, and refuses to let go of the case.
Having set the scene, the book describes the day of the anti-war procession before the G8 summit. We see the events from all perspectives: that of Clarke's parents, who turn out to be idealistic teachers who have travelled to Scotland to camp out and join the demo, the police and security forces, the disaffected young residents and the unsympathetic local councillor, Trent, who seems to crop up everywhere. Events are portrayed vividly as Rebus is, as usual, irritated by and in turn irritating anyone in authority, and as Clarke becomes increasingly concerned about her parents', and even her own, safety, as crowds threaten to turn into mobs.
The description of "the naming of the dead": a thousand victims of the Iraq war, is movingly described, as is Clarke's realisation that this also describes her calling:
"She named the dead. She recorded their last details, and tried to find out who they'd been, why they'd died. She gave a voice to the forgotten and the missing. A world filled with victims, waiting for her and other detectives like her. Detectives like Rebus, too, who gnawed away at every case, or let it gnaw at them. Never letting go, because that would have been the final insult to those names."
The book loses momentum after the day of protest is over. Rebus and Clarke seem to spend much of the next few days in a holding pattern while the author is diverted into describing the arrival of the G8 leaders, making political points and observations, and impressing us with his musical knowledge, instead of pressing on with the plot - although the sudden shock of the London tube and bus bombings of that year is well-told, dovetailing cleverly with events in Scotland.
The investigation is not short of incident: Rebus is kidnapped for an uncomfortable night in the cells; an escort girl (Molly) and a protestor (Santal) turn out to be more than they at first seem; there is definitely something dodgy about Trent and his association with the young mob element; and confusions abound as Rebus and Clarke pursue different ends of the investigation while unable to communicate effectively owing to the road blocks and other security measures. Inevitably, as this is a Rebus novel, the detectives are suspended from duty for failing to prioritise the security agenda over their pursuit of the criminal(s), but again inevitably, they press on regardless and although this infuriates the Chief Constable, nobody in the police force seems to care what Rebus is up to or tries to stop him from continuing to work from his flat. A year away from retirement, and a known maverick, Rebus's superiors seem content to bide their time until time itself takes away the man who doesn't fit the new order of policing.
Journalist Mairie Henderson makes a welcome reappearance in this book; with her help as well as that of Clarke's erstwhile suitor Eric, the two police detectives (mainly Rebus, it has to be said) solve most of the various mysteries that grow up during the course of the narrative. By the end, Rebus has the satisfaction of striking a blow against political corruption and his tormentors, as well as seeing Clarke saved from his own fate of being in the power of the nasty but unconvincingly portrayed Cafferty.
Even though the entangled crimes are all tied together in quite a neat resolution, I'd lost some of my interest because of the book's meanderings. Further, the motivation of the person eventually found to be responsible for the Clootie Well killings does not ring true. The Rebus series remains a must-read, but this particular outing would have benefited from more focus on the key characters (Rebus and Clarke, mainly, but others are too sketchy or undeveloped) and details of the investigation, and less on the injustices of globalisation and foibles of politicians or their hangers-on.
WHITE NIGHTS is the second book to feature the Shetland Island detective Jimmy Perez and the artist Fran Hunter. As the book opens, Fran and a local celebrity artist, Bella Sinclair, are about to hold a joint exhibition of their work at the Herring House, a gallery/cafe on Bella's land in the tiny hamlet of Biddista. An air of menace is subtly conveyed about the strangely low turnout at the exhibition, made even more puzzling given the presence of Bella's rock-star nephew, Roddy. Suddenly, a man bursts into tears in front of one of Fran's pictures. Jimmy takes him into the kitchen to calm down, but the man claims to have no idea of who he is, nor does he carry any identification. While Jimmy is seeing if any of the visitors know the man, he vanishes. As the disappointing evening ends, Jimmy is invited back to Fran's house, and his attention is otherwise engaged. The next morning, the crying man's dead body is found hanging in the boat shed on the beach.
With the discovery, Jimmy and his colleagues call in the irritable and ambitious Roy Taylor of the Inverness police to supervise the investigation. It rankles with Roy that Jimmy, and not he, solved their previous case (described in RAVEN BLACK), so he is determined to take a dominant role in this new case. He soon realises, however, that he has little patience for the slow pace of the Shetlands and leaves Jimmy to question the Biddista residents (four terraced houses, a farm and the large Sinclair house) while he goes to the mainland to follow what he sees as more promising leads there.
Jimmy soon discovers that the dead man was responsible for handing out leaflets on the day of the exhibition stating that the event had been cancelled owing to the death of a family member. What was his motive for this spiteful act? Even when his identity is discovered, there seems no reason for his actions.
The book is wonderful to read: powerful at conveying a way of life that has almost vanished; the daily routine of work and leisure; and the love and commitment that the islanders have for their land. The lives of the people who live in Biddista are entwined: they knew each other as children, being at school together whatever their social class, and there isn't much about each other's past that they don't know. The autocratic, egotistical Bella was in love with Lawrence, brother of the farmer, Kenny. Lawrence disappeared many years ago; at first Kenny thinks that the dead man is his lost brother, although this soon turns out not to be the case.
In the beginning of WHITE NIGHTS, Jimmy is unsure of Fran's feelings for him. As the story unfolds, their relationship strengthens, but the reader is excluded from knowing much about it.
Although the uncovering of the past, and the hunt for the identity of the mysterious man, are absorbing to read, the book fades out slightly towards the end. The story of Bella's youth, and the present-day identity of some of the admirers who hung around her at that time, is rather suddenly presented compared with the steady build-up of tension in the previous chapters. Seasoned crime-fiction readers will be ahead of the detectives on some (but not all) aspects of the investigation; and I found the killer, and motivation, implausible. However, don't let me put you off. Jimmy Perez is a memorable and attractive character; one strongly identifies with him, his concerns and his "beat" on the lonely but beautiful Shetlands.
In his accomplished follow-up to his best-selling debut THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH, Simon Beckett sends his protagonist, forensic archaeologist David Hunter, to the remote Scottish island of Ruma. When a burnt corpse is discovered in an isolated hut, the mainland police are informed, as there is no police presence on the island itself. But Superintendent Graham Wallace has too much on his plate to investigate, as he is coping with a train crash that might be the result of terrorism, so he asks David to travel to Ruma and to let him know if the death was suspicious. The body was discovered by Andrew Brody, an ex-police detective who has taken early retirement and gone to live on the island. Because Brody is retired, Wallace isn't keen to use his services officially, and instead sends the boorish Sergeant Fraser and a young rookie, Duncan, to accompany David for his examination of the corpse. David and Fraser meet several key characters on the ferry crossing to Ruma, followed up by a few more at the local hotel after they arrive.
David wants to get on with his task so that he can return to London and his girlfriend Jenny, who is not happy about the length of David's absence or his workaholism. But before David can get too far with his investigation, a severe storm hits the island, which causes all kinds of havoc, not least delaying the much-needed police reinforcements from the mainland.
I've read many crime-fiction stories set in remote spots in order for the authors to conveniently isolate a small group of suspects from the rest of society, and where the reader can have fun trying to stay a step ahead of the detective. WRITTEN IN BONE is extremely effective in this regard - David, Brody and Fraser find themselves increasingly isolated and in danger, as more people are killed, buildings are set on fire, and the storm (as well as a human hand) wrecks communication channels. The suspects include a young South African millionaire and his stunning wife - a childless couple who spend their time doing good works and stimulating the island's economy. Other characters include Maggie, a keen but green young journalist; Ellen, the supportive owner of the hotel, who has her own worries; and various suspicious, inward-looking locals who don't take kindly to what they see as outside interference.
An atmosphere of unease and seething resentment is ably conveyed, in which Brody and David struggle to keep the investigation on an even keel - not helped by Fraser's drinking and habit of blurting out confidential information to the wrong people. WRITTEN IN BONE is superbly and tightly plotted and proceeds at a thrilling pace. It really is a page-turner. My only small caveat is an occasional heavy-handedness: twice, for example, characters hint to David that they know something significant, but on both occasions are killed before they can reveal any clues. This is only a minor gripe - the book as a whole is an assured account, with the forensic details seeming authentic and unflinching, but not dwelling unnecessarily on the grim details. I knew I'd got the identity of the villain wrong when David reaches the same conclusion too easily. Sure enough, not one but three major twists follow. The middle one of these did not seem to hang together that well, but the first and last are satisfyingly shocking - and we are now on a cliffhanger until the next book in the series. I hope we don't have to wait too long to read it.
Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer and his team, part of the Glasgow police force, are called in to investigate the death of a prostitute, whose body was found at the train station with a flower between her hands. Rapidly running into a dead end, the case is rudely awakened when Kirsty MacLeod, a nurse at a local care home, is found dead in a similar manner. Following any lead that he can in a case that frustratingly runs into dead ends, Lorimer and his sidekick, a psychological profiler called Solomon Brightman, travel to Harris, one of the Hebridean Islands in the north, not only because the dead nurse comes from the island, but to interview two patients who have abruptly been sent there on "respite leave" the day after the murder. The interview with the dead girl's Aunty Mhairi, the depiction of life on the remote island, and the uncovering of Kirsty's brief, poignant life, are by far the most moving and successful parts of this book.
Back in Glasgow, Lorimer struggles to make any sense of the investigation, as yet another nurse is killed and the witnesses seem unable or unprepared to help, including the reticent manageress of the care home. At the same time, Lorimer's wife Maggie, increasingly frustrated at her empty marriage to a man who is never home, plans a year's teaching exchange in America.
Although I enjoyed this book, I felt that the police procedural aspects were quite weak on occasion. Lorimer is an interesting character, but he seems to spend most of his time with the profiler, rather than his police colleagues, in trying to solve the case - in the process, missing quite a few promising avenues. Divine Lipinski, a stimulating and unusual visitor from the Florida FBI who arrives at the start of the book, fades away and is not developed. The identity of the murderer is also evident right from the start, so for me it was a question of how the plot would all tie in together, rather than who did it. There is an interesting twist in the tail of the case, and the story and character of Phyllis, a woman with multiple sclerosis, is a highlight, as well as Phyllis's role in the eventual capturing of the villain. But the book is not helped by the expectations placed on it by the jacket blurb comparing Lorimer to Inspector Rebus (because they are both Scottish, one presumes): this series needs time to mature before these kinds of comparison can be made.
