2012 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, eighth in the Logan
McRae series. A man turns up burned to death, gangland style;
someone's beating up Asian drug dealers; oh, and two teenage lovers
haven't been seen for a few days. Logan McRae will, ultimately, solve
all of these cases…
He continues, of course, to be a mess. Even his girlfriend is now
pointing out that he's just stuck, hovering, not going forward or
backward or anywhere. (Yes, that's the same girlfriend who's in a
coma. He's having conversations with her. Not that there's anything
wrong with that. No, he hasn't been keeping with his psychiatric
therapy, why do you ask?) Frankly this is more psychological subtlety
than I had expected from the series to date, and while the usual
pattern still applies, that he's a complete screwup for the majority
of the book before turning into a mystery-solving miracle at the end,
I found this outing more plausible for him as a character.
All right, he does make certain assumptions that turn out to be
correct but that are not actually supported by the evidence available
at the time; in the real world this sort of thing often leads to
miscarriages of justice, but this is McRae, so while he may sometimes
arrest the wrong bloke he only sends bad people to court.
As for the plot, things rapidly start to overlap; there's a popular
urban fantasy novel Witchfire of which the missing girl was a fan,
she was hanging around the set where they're making a film of it, and
some of the murders show distinct influences from the book. Meanwhile
everyone's friend Wee Hamish Mowat is clearly not much longer for this
world, and is continuing in his attempts to get Logan to take over his
criminal empire after his death—after all, if Logan doesn't do it,
it'll just fall into the hands of one or more of his violent
underbosses, and they aren't planners, they'll just grind themselves
down fighting each other and harming outsiders in the struggle. So
really, it would be better for everyone…
It may be that I'm in a better mood for this now than when I read
Shatter the Bones, or that this is a better book, but I found myself
much more in sympathy with the story this time, and I will certainly
continue with the series.