One last case

Acting Detective Inspector Roberta Steel — she of the wild hair, crude and sarcastic mouth, bender of rules — is resigned to her retirement after 30 years with Police Scotland, and thinks she’ll be able to go out with a bang when she gets a call to a decomposing body found in a wheelie bin.

With eight weeks left on the job, clearing a murder case is a fine way to strut her stuff and tweak the noses of superior officers who can’t wait to see the back of her.

But as readers of tartan noir know, no murder case is simple. Steel faces a violent protest, far-right populist politicians, a byelection, drugs, a desperate former colleague begging for help, interfering spooks and an explosion that lands her in hospital in this third novel starring Steel, who first appeared as the permanent supporting character in MacBride’s popular Logan McRae series and went on to be the main character in Now We are Dead and And the Corpse Wore Tartan.

McRae is a peripheral presence here, and Steel must rely on what she calls her irregulars, four serving cops who do her favours. The main one, DC Stewart Quirrel — known as Tufty or the Wee Loon — has been a sidekick since the McRae books and whose strange ideas, hobbies and oddball speech, make you want to slap him. Yet he is honest, hard working and makes a perfect foil for Steel. Together they deliver comic relief against the bleak world they face daily.

MacBride excels at crime fiction, and layers Steel’s original bin body with the aforementioned cases in what — and no spoiler here, really — is one interrelated investigation.

The mayhem MacBride conjures is realistic, and he has a good handle on police procedures and peccadillos that he balances with a wicked streak of humour. You may find yourself laughing out loud amid the carnage.

Well-plotted police procedurals still live or die on the strength of the main character, usually an outcast investigator who uses dubious methods to solve difficult cases despite the barriers faced in a rigid system with interfering superiors. In Roberta Steel, MacBride has created one of the best; an abrasive, crude, diligent fighter for justice whose is also loyal and rooted in the family she shares with her wife Susan and their two daughters.

Steel wakes up the first morning of her retirement feeling like she’s at the bottom of an open grave waiting for the dirt to be shovelled back in. Susan has plans for her to join clubs, take up hobbies and learn to play golf, of all things, and she tries in her first days of civilian life, but the unsolved cases she was forced to leave behind have a firm hold on her. So, Steel convinces (coerces, more accurately) her irregulars to help her run a parallel investigation.

Much-beloved Scottish coppers have retired before this, but it hasn’t stopped them investigating cases, often with the help of former colleagues still on the force.

So be it with Steel and her band of irregulars. Three books aren’t enough to contain the brash, hard-working, clever and, yes, lovable Roberta Steel.

Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.