An exciting, jet-black police thriller

I’m not a big reader of this particular sub-genre though I like thrillers generally. I came across this and gave it a go on the off-chance, and so glad I did. This is an excellent and riveting book.

It’s dark and gritty stuff but that’s what you’d expect from a Glasgow murder police procedural. All the procedural details are, I presume, very well-researched. It certainly comes across as convincing to this layman’s ear. (I tire of books where the technical details seem to be lifted directly off of television at best and nothing yanks me from a story quicker than errors so glaring even I can spot them.)

The twists and revelations of plot are well laid out but more than all this it’s a fully rounded tale, depicted with a meticulous and even painterly eye for setting, albeit of the somewhat grim scenery. The lead characters are likable, engaging and, importantly for such a dark tale, very human. The whole book has a humanity to balance out the bleak content. The rest of the cast are all real too and suitably entertaining. But we slowly realise this isn’t just idle filler – the novel fills out the background by degree so you take in the details almost subliminally, slowly realising how these incidental scenes all become relevant to the knotted whole.

It’s also written with a very sly and quite black wit, an adroit turn of phrase or character detail. Not to mention an inevitable cynicism which is (to my taste at least) highly satisfying. It ticks all the boxes and fans of Val McDermid and the suchlike will be very happy.

As for the audiobook itself, the novel is aided and abetted so ably by a proper Scottish accent (though the odd elsewhere accents are somewhat less accomplished.) A novel that benefits so much from a strong sense of setting can only gain from such performance.

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