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.
The two investigations form the main narrative threads of this crime thriller. The procedural background detail feels authentic, the novel rattles along like a bolting horse, and the dialogue crackles like a firework display. MacBride focuses on his police officers, foul-mouthed mavericks and hard-drinking misfits to a man and woman. (DI Steel should be declared a national treasure.) The format may seem familiar, which indeed it is, but you rarely find it used with such bleak panache and dark humour.
It’s arguable that the Swedes produce more fine crime writers per capita than any other nation in the world. Asa Larsson is a recent and very welcome addition to their ranks. Her first novel, The Savage Altar (Viking, £12.99), is set largely in Kiruna, an obscure and isolated town in northern Sweden that has become home to a vaguely Christian religious cult.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in