2010 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, first in the Jack Logan
series. Fifteen years ago the murderer the press called Mister Whisper
kidnapped and killed three children; Jack Logan arrested him. Now
another child has gone missing and the exact same trappings are
showing up; did Logan get the wrong man?
And if you've read a bit of tartan noir, particularly a bit of
Stuart MacBride, as I have, it all feels terribly familiar. The
thing is done competently, with false leads and generally decent
investigation, but it feels at times as though characters and plot
elements are being cranked out of the tartan-noir-o-matic (an ancient
machine with an irremovable reek of rancid fat).
I think the trick that MacBride pulls off that Kirk doesn't quite is
to appreciate that a protagonist isn't necessarily a hero. A MacBride
protagonist is there to be dumped on by life, but will pull a miracle
out of his backside in the final chapters. Jack Logan is a senior
officer; he has a (mostly hinted-at) chaotic personal life, he makes
mistakes, but he's also a competent and respected leader right from
the start.
There are also some things I don't love in anyone's writing, like a
victim's-eye view that always feels exploitative and in this case
gives away information relevant to the mystery. And there's a
description of the aftermath of animal torture which I felt was a bit
out of place even in tartan noir. But in spite of these problems I
rather enjoyed the thing; it's not good, it didn't suck me in the
way my first MacBride did, but I enjoyed it even so (particularly as
an audio book) and I'll read more in the series.