EXTRACT The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride: Extract 1 of 2

Best-selling author Stuart MacBride returns with a new Logan McRae thriller. Set in Aberdeen, the Logan McRae series uses the city as the backdrop for a series of horrific crimes and murders

Drizzle misted down from a clay sky. It sat like a damp lid over a drab grey field at the base of a drab grey hill. The rising sun slipped between the two, washing a semi-naked oak tree with fire and blood.

Which was appropriate.

A brown Ford Focus was wrapped around its trunk, the bonnet crumpled, the windscreen spiderwebbed with cracks. A body slumped forward in the driver’s seat. Still and pale.

Crime-scene tape twitched and growled in the breeze, yellow-and-black like an angry wasp, as a handful of scene examiners in the full SOC kit picked their way around the wreck. The flurry and flash of photography and fingerprint powder. The smell of diesel and rotting leaves.

Logan pulled the hood of his own suit into place, the white Tyvek crackling like crumpled paper as he zipped the thing up with squeaky nitrile gloves. He stretched his chin out of the way, keeping his neck clear of the zip’s teeth. “Still don’t see what I’m doing here, Doreen.”

Detective Sergeant Taylor wriggled into her suit with all the grace of someone’s plump aunty doing the slosh at a family wedding. The hood hid her greying bob, the rest of it covering an outfit that could best be described as “Cardigan-chic”. If you were feeling generous. She pointed at the crumpled Ford. “You’ll find out.”

Typical – milking every minute of it.

They slipped on their facemasks then she led the way down the slope to the tape cordon, holding it up for him to duck under.

Logan did. “Only, RTCs aren’t usually a Professional Standards kind of thing.”

She turned and waved a hand at the hill. “Local postie was on his way to work, sees skidmarks on the road up there, looks down the hill and sees the crashed car. Calls one-oh-one.”

A pair of tyre tracks slithered and writhed their way down the yellowing grass to the Ford Focus’s remains. How the driver had managed to keep the thing from rolling was a mystery.

“See, we’re more of an ‘investigating complaints made against police officers when they’ve been naughty’ deal.”

“Traffic get here at six fifteen, tramp down the hill and discover our driver.”

Logan peered in through the passenger window.

The man behind the wheel was big as a bear, hanging forward against his seatbelt, the first rays of morning a dull gleam on his bald head. His broad face, slack and pale – even with the heavy tan. Eyes open. Mouth like a bullet wound in that massive thicket of beard. Definitely dead. “Still not seeing it, Doreen.” She gestured him over to the driver’s side. “Course it looks like accidental death, till they open the driver’s door and what do they find?”

Logan stepped around the driver’s open door… And stopped. Blood pooled in the footwell, made deepred streaks down the upholstery. Following it upwards led to a sagging hole in the driver’s shirt. So dark in there it was almost black.

“Oooh…” Logan hissed in a breath. “Stab wound?”

Don’t miss next week’s YL for the second extract from The Blood Road by Stuart MacBride, published by HarperCollins in ebook and paperback.

Photograph by Mark Mains Stuart MacBride.