No bones about it

Aberdeen can be a ghastly place, where fascists firebomb refugees, blackmailers get tortured horrendously before being gruesomely murdered, kidnap victims are near-starved in dungeons and then buried alive.

That’s a big chunk of the horrific stuff before we even get to the wretched architecture or all the vacant shops or detective sergeant (DS) Roberta Steel’s diet of sausage rolls and bacon butties.

This is the 13th book featuring detective chief inspector (DCI) Logan McRae and his merry band of Police Scotland reprobates, gifted to us by author Stuart MacBride, who most definitely is not to everyone’s tastes.

MacBride juxtaposes the most awful violence with absolutely hilarious dialogue, glorious Scottish dialect, inspired potty-mouths, eccentric eclectic characters and absurd situations ingeniously rendered.

The adventure begins with an arsonist burning down a shelter for refugees, killing one person. Someone grasses up a suspect, which somehow leads to dozens of pages involving McRae and his hapless cops chasing the suspect all over Aberdeen — it’s a veritable street-by-street tour — while the alleged villain hijacks an ice cream van, the ice-lollies entrepreneur still inside, careening throughout the city with mind-numbing jingle still bleating, before flying into the river, where more mayhem ensues.

Meanwhile, a burglar is helping himself to swag in an upstairs room, filling his pockets while waiting for the homeowner to return, knowing that a woman lives there alone. The burglar makes his living through stolen goods, but what he does afterward… as noted, MacBride juxtaposes between horrific and lighter fare, and is not for everyone.

Just as the woman comes home, the burglar hears her confronted by a police officer, who immediately conks her upside the head and drags her to the boot of his car, the burglar all the while filming the abduction on his phone and getting a good look at the licence plate, calculating how much that footage may be worth in blackmail.

The woman is an Australian multimillionaire, a ruthless, vicious oligarch who has gobbled up respectable newspapers, laid off decent journalists and turned the venerable papers into right-wing rags playing to the worst elements of society.

What her abductor does to her and why… again, not for everyone. No, it’s not sexual, we’ll say that much.

McRae has somehow risen to the rank of DCI, where his days are full of meetings, forms and paperwork galore, but the endless Police Scotland budget cuts and COVID now have him out on the street where he can wreak the most havoc.

He’s living with the long-suffering Tara, herself in financial law enforcement, rarely seeing him come home in time for tea, between them having produced a daughter who of course is precocious.

Outstanding among McRae’s crew is constable Tufty, a spirited twit whom Logan treats as an ijit but who comes up with more than his share of bright ideas. The word “unique” should be used on the rarest of occasions, but Tufty’s syntax and grammar can only be described as such.

Meanwhile DS Roberta Steel is simply one of the greatest and most bizarre characters in police fiction.

She was once McRae’s boss and a DCI herself, though how she did it in a conservative paramilitary organization, MacBride never really explained. She was demoted after planting evidence to wrongfully convict the vilest of villains who kept getting away with it.

McRae is a sperm donor for Steel and her wife Susan’s kids, and plays an active role in their lives.

MacBride describes Steel as having a huge nose and a mass of gray hair somewhere between a Brillo pad and a briar patch. Slovenly would be a compliment; she slouches and flakes out while scratching herself in private places and adjusting her bra and unmentionables in front of everyone, constantly eating, smoking, vaping or all of the above at once.

Her profanity is inspired by genius. While there is no sign she has ever been unfaithful to Susan, she hits on women in public, especially heterosexuals with far more power than she, including senior police officers, noting with glee the sexual wonders she can unleash in them if they will only consent.

Some may note with delight or dismay that the book is 600-plus pages long, at a time too many authors think 280 pages will suffice.

If you’re into Stuart MacBride, his latest won’t feel long enough. Bring your own sausage rolls and bacon butties.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was in Aberdeen to get the ferry to Shetland. He thought it was nicely old, but who would trust anything an English-born person would say about Scotland?