2012 mystery, first in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A
prominent city elder in Edinburgh is killed, but less than a day later
his killer commits a public and messy suicide. Case closed, and the
police are happy. But McLean won't let it lie, especially when the
same thing happens again.
As with The Book of Souls, this is police procedural with a
light supernatural element. And that's a fine line to walk: as Larry
Niven wrote about SF detective stories, you need to establish the
ground rules or the mystery doesn't work at all. That's something
Oswald does well here: while it's clear that he intends the narrative
to include a supernatural component, the mystery is still solved by
police work rather than by magic.
Yes, there is a lot of cliché, much of it based round McLean himself:
unusual wealth, stupid blundering superior, tragic past and love life,
reputation for getting the job done, and so on. Forensic procedure is
based more on television than on real-world practices. And McLean is
rather slow to work out the connections between the various incidents
that come to his attention; that pacing is a hard thing to get right,
but if there must be an error I'd rather be left feeling
under-informed than have spotted things very early on and had to wait
for the protagonist to catch up. In particular, a principal villain is
very blatantly signalled.
But even so, McLean is a sympathetic character (though he would
doubtless try hard to avoid it); he may be clichéd but they're clichés
that work and give him a solid personality; and I enjoy visiting his
world even when it's soaked in gore. (The opening chapter is not for
those with a weak stomach, but nonetheless it contains important
clues.)
Followed by The Book of Souls.
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