Scottish book of the week

The Blood Road, By Stuart MacBride, HarperCollins, £7.99 Writing genre thrillers and keeping your fans happy is a balancing act, particularly when you tweak the formula, and you’ve got to keep tweaking the formula to keep your fans happy.

Of course essential plot tenets remain when you write Scottish crime like Stuart MacBride does, and this latest in his Logan McRae series manages to straddle the expected and the unexpected with ease.

When former colleague DI Bell turns up stabbed to death and slumped at the wheel of a car wreck, it’s a double shock. Because Logan and his colleagues buried their beloved colleague, “DingDong” Bell, two years ago. So who did they bury? And why did DI Bell fake his own death and start a new life in Spain?

Logan’s enduring popularity with fans is the sign of a crime writer who has his man down, if you’ll pardon the expression. Stuart has developed, and evolved, a credible, complex, engaging character in his scarred, stoic Aberdeen cop, Inspector McCrae – and yes, he’s an inspector now, since he’s moved to Police Standards, policing the police, and getting treated warily by his former CID colleagues.

He has a new love interest, the gorgeous Tara; the brassy, spiky, infuriating mother of his children, DS Roberta Steel, is now on his team (although hardly obedient), and Logan is soon stepping out of his comfort zone, going out on a limb to prevent unimaginable evil from having its way.

More bodies start turning up. Plus the chaotic DS Chalmers seems to be falling apart, someone has beaten her up and she’s becoming unreliable. And the trail keeps pointing Logan to missing children. Unease grows to become a high-pitched scream.

Stuart MacBride does well to create complex and divergent plot strands and pull them together with practised ease. He uses his trademark juxtaposition of humour and gritty reality to hurry his story along, he leads his readers authoritatively, his is a narrative voice we trust. The quality of his writing, too, is a pleasure, his sentences crisp, polished vehicles to take us where we want to go. In this case, it’s on a road to a warehouse that’s holding your worst nightmares.

A book well worth reading on a cold night by the fire.

Review by Gillian Lord.