Scottish sleuths unearth clues of grisly graveyard

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This article was published 01/05/2021 (1929 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s awkward when a house perched on the edge of an eroding Scottish cliff starts falling into the North Sea — the fractured cliff face reveals the tortured skeletons of dozens of murder victims buried beneath the basement.

Former detective Inspector Ash Henderson and forensic psychologist Alice MacDonald already have their sleuthing hands full trying to catch a pedophile who’s abducted and murdered three wee children, and is poised to strike again.

But before the murder house goes over the edge, a desperate search turns up dozens of Polaroid before-and-after porn shots of slaughtered young adults who disappeared over decades.

The owner of the house, as you may have imagined, has scarpered.

And Stuart MacBride, one of the most brilliant of Scotland’s never-ending supply of exceptional mystery writers, is off and running to test just how far readers are willing to let his dark humour go.

Henderson and MacDonald are members of something called the Lateral Investigative and Review Unit, civilians who get called in to help when the police stall on major crimes. You can imagine how that goes over with the constabulary, though they have a few colourful friends within Police Scotland.

Henderson was a D.I. when his little daughter was abducted and tortured to death by a pedophile, who sent Henderson a photo of her on each of her birthdays. There is a hint that Henderson has been in prison; of the pedophile’s fate, no mention. You could Google the plots of the handful of sporadic previous Ash Henderson books, but we’re going with what MacBride tells us.

MacBride’s usual protagonists are coppers Logan McRae and Roberta Steel in Aberdeen. Those books are often absurdly funny, generous with off-the-wall characters, hilarious insults and profanity in working-class Scottish idiom and dialect.

It’s all the same here, but… but…. maybe if MacBride was talking cunning art thieves in posh neighbourhoods, or some kid in his parents’ basement in Glasgow using his iPad to rip off a fortune in Bitcoin from the Russian mob, but we’re talking a pedophile murderer and a serial killer with a torture chamber.

After a while, you wonder if maybe MacBride is having us on, so loosely does Henderson dance around the edge of the law — waterboarding suspects, destroying crime scenes, buying guns from career criminals.

At one point Henderson gets pointed to a book club of elderly folks who may have useful memories. It’s obvious they’ve just read a Logan McRae and are unimpressed, especially with the lesbian detective — not because she’s lesbian, it goes without saying, but because she has a potty mouth and constantly scratches herself publicly in inappropriate places.

There are two vicious thugs used almost as comic relief — think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Goodfellas.

The media are vile, descending callously in hordes at scenes of unimaginable tragedy, far outnumbering in fictional Oldcastle the collective newsrooms of all the media in Winnipeg, campuses included.

It turns out newspaper editors have a budget for hiring muscle to beat up cops who won’t share secret information. Who knew?

One main character — a Black female D.S. — suddenly just drops out of the book, never to be mentioned again. Picky, perhaps, but kind of sloppy in the storytelling.

The Coffinmaker’s Garden is a gripping mystery set in fascinating locales full of bizarre people, but it’s far from Stuart MacBride’s best work, and the jarring juxtaposition between hiply tartan dialogue and murdered children and tortured teens… some people may find that really cool, but you really wouldn’t want to meet such readers.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin doesn’t get far in Stuart MacBride books before craving a bacon and sausage butty with brown sauce.