Now We Are Dead, by Stuart MacBride

Mr MacBride’s archetypical burnt-out but brilliant copper Logan Macrae features only peripherally here; instead the floor is given to Detective Chief Inspector Roberta Steel, proudly gay and relentless enemy of Aberdeen’s bad guys – until her illegal efforts to put rapist Jack Wallace behind bars result in exposure, a court case, and demotion to Detective Sergeant. And an insatiable desire for revenge against the Motherfunker who dobbed her in – Logan Macrae. (See review below).

To add awful insult to terrible injury, the brutal rapes are still happening, and with each new crime, the ‘raping wee shite’ she put away (now released from prison and trumpeting his innocence all over the media) cannot resist sending a video of himself and ‘friends’ going to the movies, having dinner, clubbing – all at the exact times that the rapes occurred: Roberta knows Wallace is behind each crime, but proof is impossible to come by and it is not long before she is in trouble with her superiors – again! – for surveilling the Wee Shite’s house, much to his delight; he has a video of her doing just that and he has made an official complaint of harassment to her boss. Just what she needs. To make matters even worse, she is told that if she keeps up with the harassment, she won’t just be losing her job, but her behaviour will be terminating the job of her long-suffering but protective assistant Detective Constable Tufty, in her opinion a ‘useless wee spud’ – but her useless wee spud. She’s on a final warning.

There is an element of Keystone Cops to the opening chapters of ‘Now We Are Dead’; there is lots of comedy, clever repartee, not to mention cheeky young kids training to be tomorrow’s crims, but Mr MacBride brings us all back to cruel, stark reality with Steel and Tufty’s efforts to prosecute a debt collector for ruthlessly beating an old lady and cooking her little dog in her microwave, and the discovery by them of an eight month old baby left in his cot with a tin of dog food while his mother died from an overdose on the filthy mattress in front of him. In both cases, the neighbours refuse to give evidence: in the baby’s case the neighbours got out the air freshener when the smells got worse. Which proves that such is Mr MacBride’s storytelling skill he can take readers anywhere he likes on the emotional spectrum that he chooses, and it is not always a comfortable journey.

It is clear too, that Steel and Tufty are in line for a very messy showdown with Raping Wee Shite Jack Wallace; once again it isn’t pretty, but again Mr MacBride demonstrates his effortless mastery of the Crime genre. My only criticism is that he doesn’t write his stories quickly enough: there should be one every six months, not a measly one per year!

FIVE STARS

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In the Cold Dark Ground, by Stuart MacBride

Logan Balmoral MacRae is back, and about time, too, I say! In the tried and true genre of Crime fiction – you know; burnt-out detectives with shattered private lives but an uncanny knack for solving the most difficult crimes – well, Burn-Out Logan makes his recent experience of demotion to Police Sergeant in a small but dreary town in North East Scotland entirely credible. Yes, he – and his team of fellow reprobate law-enforcers - all suffer from varying degrees of exhaustion and burn-out, but policing anywhere is a tough job: someone has to do it and they’ve put their hands up. More fools them.

Not much has changed since Logan’s last appearance in ‘The Missing and the Dead’ except to worsen: his beloved girlfriend Samantha has been in a coma for five years (truly!). She will never wake and he has been told by hospital staff that it is time to say goodbye, a situation he has been dreading and shying away from even though his rational mind knows it is inevitable. Another death is imminent: wee Hamish Mowat, crime boss supreme of Aberdeen is in the terminal stages of cancer. In a last conversation with Logan, wee Hamish informs him that he wishes Logan to take control of his empire for he knows that upon his death all the other crime lords from near and far will be circling like vultures, ready to break up his ‘life’s work’: he is convinced that Logan (despite the fact that he is a Police Officer – how I wish I’d read all those earlier books!) will be the only one strong enough to hold it all together. All this under the homicidally jealous eye of Reuben, the Reubenator, wee Hamish’s wing man who has the intimidatory strength to keep things going – but not the brains. Reuben hates Logan, and Logan knows it is only a matter of time before the Reubenator mounts an attack.

He is almost relieved when a conventional murder rears its ugly head: a man’s naked body is found in the woods, hands bound behind his back and a rubbish bag taped over his head. Despite the classic imitation of a local gangland-style killing, Logan is not convinced that the Bad Guys actually did this – for once, they are innocent – of this crime, anyway, and when the Major Investigation Team from Aberdeen (still run by his old boss and friend – and proud lesbian – DCI Steel) mounts an investigation, his suspicions prove to be correct.

Sadly, Logan’s week from Hell doesn’t end there: he is also asked by the Police Internal Professional Standards division to covertly investigate DCI Steel: there is suspicion that she manufactured evidence to send a sexual predator and rapist to jail. As much as everyone abhors his crimes (for which he was never convicted) Scottish justice has to be SEEN to be done: who better to investigate Roberta Steel, than her trusted friend and confidante, the turkey-baster father of her children, Logan Balmoral MacRae. Yes, let’s add betrayal to the list of Logan’s Lousy Week.

Last but not least, a new Superintendent from the Serious Organised Crime Task Force is visiting and seems have taken an inexplicable and irrational dislike to him, thus making his life doubly miserable. Could anything else go wrong? Well, of course it can and it does, at a breakneck pace that this reader could barely stand – I wanted to yell ‘Slow down, slow down!!’ – and all because I didn’t want this mighty episode in the hapless (but not entirely hopeless) life and times of Logan to end. Stuart MacBride is a storyteller Extraordinaire, a superb wordsmith who is in the enviable position of being unable to write fast enough to supply his readers’ demands.

FIVE STARS