Pick of the crime novels

Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than his excellent Logan McRae series. Set in a fictional Scottish city where a miasma of corruption oozes out of the very stones, most of its characters are sadistic, victimised or both. The narrator, Ash Henderson, appeared in an earlier, equally bleak novel. Now an ex-detective inspector, he’s being systematically persecuted in prison (where most of the other inmates seem to be former cops as well). Matters look up, at least for Henderson, when he is temporarily, if implausibly, seconded to help investigate a serial killer known as the Inside Man, who murders women and sews dolls into their stomachs.

All this reads like a recipe for a grim and unremittingly brutal story. It’s guilty as charged — but the novel is much more than this. MacBride constructs a powerful, swift-moving narrative that doesn’t so much surprise the reader as ambush him occasionally with a blunt instrument.