Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

First published in Great Britain in 2005

Cold Granite takes place in the cold, wet, Granite City of Aberdeen. Logan McRae is returning to duty as a detective sergeant with the Grampian Police after spending a year recovering from knife wounds. His first day back greets him with the corpse of a three-year-old child who has been missing for months, a punch in the stomach from the murdered child's distraught grandfather, a scolding from his new boss, and an awkward encounter with his former girlfriend, who is also the medical examiner. McRae's life goes downhill from there. When another child soon turns up missing -- and then dead -- McRae suspects he has a serial killer on his hands.

McRae and his colleagues have a talent for arresting the wrong person, just as Stuart MacBride has a talent for misdirection. The seasoned reader will know that a couple of early suspects must be innocent, simply because too many pages remain when they are arrested. As McRae works his way through the evidence, the usual foes turn up to make his life miserable: a crafty defense attorney, a sneaky reporter, even some ordinary criminals. To sweeten the story, a couple of adults turn up dead, giving the beleaguered McRae even more murders to solve.

Cold Granite is a conventional police procedural, written in a conventional style. The pace is steady and the plot takes a couple of interesting twists, building suspense in fairly predictable ways. Detailed and grizzly descriptions of post-mortem examinations add to the novel's realism, although readers with weak stomachs might want to skip those scenes. The influence of the press on criminal investigations and the ability of reporters to stir a public thirst for vengeance against any possible suspect, regardless of the suspect's guilt or innocence, is the story's strongest theme.

I might have been more enthused about Cold Granite if I had read it before reading the most recent Logan McRae novel,  Close to the Bone. Cold Granite lacks the humor that makes Close to the Bone so enjoyable and therefore suffers by comparison. Granted, the plot's focus on child abduction doesn't lend itself to humor, but MacBride's eventual decision to write a lighter sort of novel was wise. Humor is really his forte.

Cold Granite establishes McRae as a detective who has the misfortunate to be competent, a quality that assures his workload will always be heavier than that of detectives who can't be trusted to catch a criminal if they witness the crime themselves. His personal life is in shambles, in part due to a failed relationship with the medical examiner. There isn't much more to McRae's personality in the first novel of the series, but it's a good starting point.

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