No Less the Devil, by Stuart MacBride

BANTAM PRESS, £20 REVIEW BY KIRSTY McLUCKIE

The structure of this darkly humorous standalone novel from crime author Stuart MacBride allows it to hit the ground running.

The narrative opens 17 months into an investigation into a spate of serial killings in a fictitious town, Oldcastle, in the north-east of Scotland. Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh is revisiting five crime scenes where victims’ bodies were discovered in the hope of making a breakthrough.

The killer has been nicknamed the Bloodsmith by the press and there are shades of Jack the Ripper in the way that the bodies have been mutilated and echoes of the Yorkshire Ripper in the repeated criticism of the police who are

“still no nearer to catching him”.

At each murder scene, the words “Help Me” have been scrawled in victims’ blood.

In the first case this was seen as a plea from the dying; by the second, it becomes clear that the entreaty is from the killer.

Intercut is the decades-old case of an 11-year-old boy who, with an unknown accomplice, confessed to killing a homeless man. Now out of jail and living on the streets with a drug habit, he contacts Lucy, begging for protection from “Them”.

Our heroine herself has a mysterious, traumatic past.

She is urged into counselling by concerned colleagues, her name is recognised by the public and she receives sympathetic treatment because of “the incident”. She refuses to discuss what happened, so it is halfway through the novel before we find out.

MacBride is not just a master at capturing the stomach-turning crime scenes and fastpaced action, but has talent for describing the less appealing aspects of life. His vivid rendering of his characters’ appearances, bodily emissions and even eating habits mean this isn’t a novel to read over dinner.