Since the 1990s, a tartan tide has flooded the coasts of crime fiction, and it still shows no sign of ebbing in terms of either quality or quantity. Broken Skin (HarperCollins, £12.99) is Stuart MacBride’s third investigation set on the wilder shores of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. The novel opens as Logan’s volatile girlfriend, PC Jackie ‘Ball Breaker’ Watson, acts as bait (and lives up to her nickname) in a successful police operation that captures the Granite City Rapist. The only problem is that the rapist turns out to be the boy wonder of Aberdeen Football Club, and therefore the darling of the media and equipped with the best defence lawyer money can buy. On the same evening Logan is examining the mutilated body of an unknown man which has been wrapped in a blanket and dumped outside Accident and Emergency by an Irishman in a Volvo.
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