Part of Series
Nearly bouncing back from a transfer, Detective Sergeant Logan McRae is still looking at nothing but dead ends. His only chance of escaping his current post is to get noticed. Not that any of the cases he’s working on are the type that you want to get noticed for. For starters, someone dumped a dying man outside the hospital. McRae’s boss D.I. Roberta Steel and her team can’t get an ID on the man, the person who dropped him off, or the car. McRae's second case is hardly any better. It involves a knife-wielding eight-year-old who is not only still at large but getting all kinds of sympathy in the newspapers. That kind of press does little for the department’s accusations against Robert Macintyre, Aberdeen’s star soccer player and another media darling. WPC Jackie Watson, McRae’s girlfriend, is convinced Robert is a serial rapist, but they can’t even hold him let alone charge him when the whole city thinks he’s being framed. Catching these perps is thankless work, and even if he does, it seems like McRae’s chances of getting off Steel’s team are as bad as Aberdeen’s without their leading goal scorer. With his third masterful installment in a series that combines fast-paced suspense with a dark, distinctly Scottish sense of humor, Stuart MacBride has firmly established himself as a major crime-writing talent.
Author
Aka Stuart B. MacBride The life and times of a bearded write-ist. Stuart MacBride (that's me) was born in Dumbarton—which is Glasgow as far as I'm concerned—moving up to Aberdeen at the tender age of two, when fashions were questionable. Nothing much happened for years and years and years: learned to play the recorder, then forgot how when they changed from little coloured dots to proper musical notes (why the hell couldn't they have taught us the notes in the first bloody place? I could have been performing my earth-shattering rendition of 'Three Blind Mice' at the Albert Hall by now!); appeared in some bizarre World War Two musical production; did my best to avoid eating haggis and generally ran about the place a lot. Next up was an elongated spell in Westhill—a small suburb seven miles west of Aberdeen—where I embarked upon a mediocre academic career, hindered by a complete inability to spell and an attention span the length of a gnat's doodad. And so to UNIVERSITY, far too young, naive and stupid to be away from the family home, sharing a subterranean flat in one of the seedier bits of Edinburgh with a mad Irishman, and four other bizarre individuals. The highlight of walking to the art school in the mornings (yes: we were students, but we still did mornings) was trying not to tread in the fresh bloodstains outside our front door, and dodging the undercover CID officers trying to buy drugs. Lovely place. But university and I did not see eye to eye, so off I went to work offshore. Like many all-male environments, working offshore was the intellectual equivalent of Animal House, only without the clever bits. Swearing, smoking, eating, more swearing, pornography, swearing, drinking endless plastic cups of tea... and did I mention the swearing? But it was more money than I'd seen in my life! There's something about being handed a wadge of cash as you clamber off the minibus from the heliport, having spent the last two weeks offshore and the last two hours in an orange, rubber romper suit / body bag, then blowing most of it in the pubs and clubs of Aberdeen. And being young enough to get away without a hangover. Then came a spell of working for myself as a graphic designer, which went the way of all flesh and into the heady world of studio management for a nation-wide marketing company. Then some more freelance design work, a handful of voiceovers for local radio and video production companies and a bash at being an actor (with a small 'a'), giving it up when it became clear there was no way I was ever going to be good enough to earn a decent living. It was about this time I fell into bad company—a blonde from Fife who conned me into marrying her—and started producing websites for a friend's fledgling Internet company. From there it was a roller coaster ride (in that it made a lot of people feel decidedly unwell) from web designer to web manager, lead programmer, team lead and other assorted technical bollocks with three different companies, eventually ending up as a project manager for a global IT company. But there was always the writing (well, that's not true, the writing only started two chapters above this one). I fell victim to that most dreadful of things: peer pressure. Two friends were writing novels and I thought, 'why not? I could do that'. Took a few years though...
