2012 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, first in the Ash
Henderson series. A serial killer takes girls just before their
thirteenth birthdays, kills them, and sends a photograph of the
process every subsequent year. DC Ash Henderson is really not the man
to crack the case.
Even more than fellow Oldcastle series lead Logan McRae, Ash is
seriously broken, and while he spends a lot of time being tossed
around by fate and the environment, whenever he does have a choice to
make he tends to take the worst possible option. The reader isn't, I
think, expected to sympathise with him particularly; yes, he's had a
very tough time, but many of his problems are of his own making.
That said, having read a good few MacBrides at this point, I wasn't
really surprised. Instead, I allowed myself to wallow in a new view of
the grottiness of Oldcastle, with abandoned parks and disintegrating
council estates jammed up against grotty pubs and DIY shops where they
won't look twice at all the knives, pliers and duct tape you're
buying late at night.
Meanwhile Ash ends up babysitting a forensic psychologist (the last
one destroyed all the records and then killed himself), Alice
McDonald, who rapidly became my favourite character here, She may be
pretty twitchy, but her reaction to Ash is basically the same as any
reasonable person's would be, so she provides some grounding even as
in a narrative sense she frees Ash to do his thing. (Logan McRae gets
good at detecting as we approach the final segments of his books. Ash
here carries on leaping to conclusions.)
It's grisly stuff; there's a lot of death and injury, much of it dealt
to or by Ash. Indeed, one could argue that this is verging into
horror, though there is a genuine mystery going on too.
For my taste I'm glad I came here via the milder MacBrides; I suspect
that if I'd met this cold I'd have enjoyed it rather less. However,
I'd praise Ian Hanmore, the narrator of the audio version, who manages
a variety of distinct but authentic Scottish and other accents in
varying degrees of nastiness and menace.