2011 tartan noir, collection of loosely-linked short stories. It's a few
days before Christmas in Oldcastle, and several people won't be
having a merry Christmas.
Most of MacBride's writing is police procedurals, but while the
police do have a limited presence here, we spend most of our time with
the criminals: druggies turned cat-burglar to try to pay off their
debt, prison inmates, after-school drug dealers, criminal masterminds,
paedophiles… and even the occasional good guy, but in a very MacBride
way.
I shan't review the stories individually, both because they make more
sense as part of a set, but also because they generally take the form
of a gradual explanation of what's going on, and once one's got the
hang of thinking of the most horrible explanation possible that's
usually the right answer.
But overall there's an effective inevitability about all the downfalls
here: it didn't go wrong when the latest scheme turned out bad, it
went wrong a very long time before that, but it's just taken them this
long to notice.