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COLD GRANITE
by Stuart MacBride
HarperCollins, January 2006
592 pages
6.99GBP
ISBN: 0007193149


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

DS Logan McRae's not having a good time of it. It's his first day back at work after a year off sick and already he's plunged into a murder enquiry. And his pathologist ex-girlfriend Isobel doesn't seem terribly pleased to see him. Oh, and the weather is lousy. And it all gets much worse.

This is Aberdeen, renowned for its granite buildings, rain, rain, more rain and sometimes snow. And on top of all this is a serial killer who is abducting young children. The body of four-year-old David Reid, found in a drainage ditch at the start of the book, is just the first.

Once it becomes apparent that the killer is giving police the runaround, the press start to pile on the pressure. And Logan becomes an unwilling media star.

COLD GRANITE heralds a tremendous new voice in crime fiction -- MacBride is wry, dry and a master storyteller. His Aberdeen is pretty much as grim as Rankin's Edinburgh, but COLD GRANITE fairly crackles off the page.

There's a highly-entertaining supporting cast in the shape of sweet-munching would-be thesp DI Insch who has the charm of a Rottweiler, foul-mouthed WPC Watson -- a woman who takes no prisoners -- who's giving the task of chaperoning Logan round the city, and a host of other entertaining little cameos, including the biscuit-munching Big Gary and slimy solicitor Sandy Moir-Farquharson.

MacBride handles his story with aplomb. The humour is used sparingly and often veers towards the decidedly black. COLD GRANITE is the kind of book which, you get the feeling, captures the frustrations of police work -- constant hard graft, too many knockbacks, and the occasional lucky break.

The only thing to read oddly is the references to past history between Logan and Isobel -- at times it sounds like this is the second book in the series when in fact it is a highly accomplished debut novel. Apparently there's more to come from Stuart MacBride and on this evidence he could soon be up there jostling with the likes of Rankin.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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