RogerBW's Blog

Close to the Bone, Stuart MacBride 07 July 2025

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.

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Previous in series: Shatter the Bones | Series: Logan McRae

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