Links: Dying Light Review / Author's Website / Show Official Info /

Stuart MacBride's Aberdeen is as cold, rainy, and filled with a dour bleakness as LA is full of unrelenting heat and sunshine, and each of these extremes turns out to be perfect settings for noir fiction. Logan MacRae is back in his third book, still assigned to the foul mouthed Lesbian DI Steele, whose team is "Not home to Mr. Fuckup..." or so they're instructed to tell themselves at staff meetings. Logan's girlfriend Police Constable (PC) Jackie Watson, is also in the department's poor graces herself, for kicking in the ribs of a violent rapist she'd apprehended who turned out to be a local football star and she's in a foul mood about it. To add insult to injury Logan winds up getting beaten up by an 8 year old with a knife and club, and teamed up with a PC whose intimate knowledge of the local bondage scene is both as much asset as albatross. Heaping more pain on our the DS, he's been loaned out to DI Insch, think Nero Wolfe with a penchant for the theater, and everybody seems to want him to do their job for them. If he does, he might just climb out of the pit he's been thrown into, but from where he stands it's just a long gray walk in the cold rain with no end in sight. Sounds like good fun for us, if not the good Detective Sergeant, and indeed it is.

At the beginning of his previous book Dying Light, the third in Stuart MacBride's series of police procedurals set in Aberdeen, Scotland and following the cases, career, and confusion that surround Detective Sergeant Logan MacRae, the DS was sent down from the elite team of investigators working for Detective Inspector Insch to be part of DI Steele's crew, where every meeting ends with the group cheer, "We are not home to Mr. Fuck Up!" Yes, well, the lady doth protest too much, as her squad is exactly that. Logan wound up here through no fault of his own, but a classic miscarriage of organizational justice, and his only hope of getting back out is to do good work and hopefully get back into the graces of the department.

Interestingly, it's his diligence that often seems to get in the way of this return to the light. That and the perversity of criminals and the public in general. Oh, and the small fact that the better he does, the more credit his DI gets...and the more valuable he becomes where he is. Steel, an overbearing lesbian slacker nicotine addict with a penchant for excuses finds in the hardworking Logan a perfect tool for avoiding the actual business of police work, except for the parts where she gets to sit suspects' living rooms and drink tea and consume pastries. This appears to happen, by the way, every time a police officer steps inside a Scottish home, and it's a wonder they all don't weigh a ton. Some do, but we'll get to DI Insch in a few...no, right about now.

In the last book it was easy to see that DI Insch was a superior investigator to Steel, but in Bloodshot the lines get blurred when Steel's inability to close cases causes the department to assign Insch to oversee her work and help move the cases along. The upshot of this is that Logan gets to work for both DIs, and finds himself in an uncomfortable tug of war where each is generally intolerant of the demands of the other. Loudly. And of late, Insch is louder than usual, or at least grumpier than usual. He's taken on an amateur production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, using a combination of police force and local theatrical talent, and overall the best that can be said of the cast is that they show up and haven't killed anybody. Or at least haven't been convicted.

Logan's live-in girlfriend, Police Constable (PC) Jackie Watson, is in a foul mood as well, so there's no peace at home for our boy. The book opens with the arrest of a violent rapist by Jackie, who can't resist a bit of rough handling as payback for the girls he's mutilated. Roughing earns her a penalty when it turns out that she's arrested a local football hero, and his lawyer manages to get him off Scott free. So Jackie gets penalty assignments in filing, and starts spending her nights out with a "friend". So, once again, Logan's only solace comes from doing the thing he's best at...solving cases through doggedly determined police work.

As usual, the author has come up with a collection of crimes that interconnect in one way or another, brilliantly demonstrating how one action can lead to an ever widening series of reactions. And again it turns out that Aberdeen is an onion with many layers, many secrets being kept, and a lot of closed circuit TV cameras watching the whole affair. It's an interesting exercise in civil rights, in a country you don't have the right to an attorney during questioning, and someone is watching your every move...mostly, yet the whole thing comes off as far from Orwellian. Of course, we're on the inside looking out, and we don't know how the goldfish feel about it, but it seems to be working.

In the last book we found it easy to sympathize with Logan's plight in being sent down to work for DI Steele, rather than the more talented Insch, but though she's a nightmare in many respects, we're gradually forced to admit that she's a canny investigator in her own right. The question that Logan never seems to ask is what it would take for him to get out from under either DI and move up on his own?

In the preface, the author says that the third time is the charm, and if he were to arrive at some sort of closure for Logan I'd be inclined to agree. He doesn't though, and the result is another shiny piece on the expanding bracelet that the books are filling up. The story is engaging, the characters intriguing and well fleshed out and the crimes are cunning and complex. Each story has been good in itself, and very much worth reading, but Logan hasn't been able to engage proactively in any of the areas of his life and continues to be forced to react to circumstances, whether it's serving the tug of war between DIs, or coping with his girlfriends mysterious evenings out, he needs to take the bull by the horns and make something happen soon.