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Pan Macmillan photo<\/p>\n
Scottish writer Stuart MacBride has written 13 Logan McRae novels and six books set in the fictional town of Oldcastle.<\/p>\n
MacBride juxtaposes the most awful violence with absolutely hilarious dialogue, glorious Scottish dialect, inspired potty-mouths, eccentric eclectic characters and absurd situations ingeniously rendered.<\/p>\n
The adventure begins with an arsonist burning down a shelter for refugees, killing one person. Someone grasses up a suspect, which somehow leads to dozens of pages involving McRae and his hapless cops chasing the suspect all over Aberdeen \u2014 it\u2019s a veritable street-by-street tour \u2014 while the alleged villain hijacks an ice cream van, the ice-lollies entrepreneur still inside, careening throughout the city with mind-numbing jingle still bleating, before flying into the river, where more mayhem ensues.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a burglar is helping himself to swag in an upstairs room, filling his pockets while waiting for the homeowner to return, knowing that a woman lives there alone. The burglar makes his living through stolen goods, but what he does afterward\u2026 as noted, MacBride juxtaposes between horrific and lighter fare, and is not for everyone.<\/p>\n
Just as the woman comes home, the burglar hears her confronted by a police officer, who immediately conks her upside the head and drags her to the boot of his car, the burglar all the while filming the abduction on his phone and getting a good look at the licence plate, calculating how much that footage may be worth in blackmail.<\/p>\n
The woman is an Australian multimillionaire, a ruthless, vicious oligarch who has gobbled up respectable newspapers, laid off decent journalists and turned the venerable papers into right-wing rags playing to the worst elements of society.<\/p>\n
What her abductor does to her and why\u2026 again, not for everyone. No, it\u2019s not sexual, we\u2019ll say that much.<\/p>\n
McRae has somehow risen to the rank of DCI, where his days are full of meetings, forms and paperwork galore, but the endless Police Scotland budget cuts and COVID now have him out on the street where he can wreak the most havoc.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s living with the long-suffering Tara, herself in financial law enforcement, rarely seeing him come home in time for tea, between them having produced a daughter who of course is precocious.<\/p>\n
Outstanding among McRae\u2019s crew is constable Tufty, a spirited twit whom Logan treats as an ijit but who comes up with more than his share of bright ideas. The word \u201cunique\u201d should be used on the rarest of occasions, but Tufty\u2019s syntax and grammar can only be described as such.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile DS Roberta Steel is simply one of the greatest and most bizarre characters in police fiction.<\/p>\n