2019 police procedural mystery, tartan noir, third in the Jack
Logan series. Women are being murdered by an unusually competent
killer.
But I think Kirk is weakest with this sort of relatively
standard, police chasing a psychopathic serial killer, one murder
after another, plot. The second book, Thicker Than Water, got away
from this and did rather better, but now we're in something closer to
the standard detective formula of the first book, and while it's still
interesting I didn't find it as enjoyable.
But there are improvements: Kirk doesn't give away information about
the killer that the police don't have too, and apart from an incident
near the end which could be justified on other grounds, he avoids
descriptions from the victim's point of view. There's gore, but it
doesn't feel prurient. If the killer needs several skills that are
quite hard to acquire individually, never mind together, there is at
least a mechanism by which that could have happened. (Though I do find
it hard to credit being good enough at computer intrusion to embed a
video on every HOLMES2 login screen across the UK; I think that's
rather harder than Kirk apparently does. I could much more easily
believe it's been done to every computer in that particular police
station.)
There are brief mentions of ongoing plot elements, but mostly this is
a series book; the team looks much the same at the end as it does at
the start, and I can't help noticing that one of them doesn't have
much to do. Quite fun, but more enjoyable during the reading than in
the recollection that goes into writing this review.