The Art of Dying by Douglas Lindsay

Published digitally in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton/Mulholland Books on August 22, 2019

The Art of Dying is the third novel in a series set in Scotland, premised on the protagonist’s early retirement as a spy who now works as a homicide detective. Detective Inspector Westphall’s history as a man who has seen too much of the world’s ugliness positions him as a reliable noir character. He is haunted by people who have died, people he has hurt. His dreams may be portents of deaths to come.

Westphall begins the novel by investigating the beating death of a man at a football (soccer) game. The murder is witnessed by the victim’s stepson, who is clobbered while trying to intervene despite his belief that his stepdad is an asshole. The stepdad had challenged a racist comment that someone made about a member of the home team, making that unidentified fan the only initial suspect.

What appears to be a routine killing by a football hooligan turns into a complicated investigation when other suspects enter the picture. The victim was CEO of a rapidly expanding funeral business. He was despised by his sister but apparently loved by his wife. He regularly visited an infirm grandmother who squandered the family wealth on a painting. A Russian woman had an affair with him and then, acting on her father’s behalf, invested in his business. And so the list of suspects grows, even before a hedge fund guy who sits on the board of the victim’s business is disemboweled.

After another, and seemingly unrelated, disemboweled murder victim is found in a care home, Westphall has a mystery on his hands. The mystery compounds when another recent death in the care home is determined to have been caused by strangulation. And yes, this is the same care home where the grandmother who spent the family fortune on a gruesome painting of infanticide resides. She spends every day staring at the painting, oblivious to everything else in the world. The connection between art and death gives the novel its title.

Douglas Lindsay creates a strong noir atmosphere — rain and wind and the sea endlessly crashing against Scottish shores, a landscape that might drive anyone to commit murder. He also creates strong characters. The elderly residents of the care home have varying personalities. A blind man who plays chess against himself contributes a philosophical perspective that aids the investigation. The reason the grandmother stares at the painting without speaking a word, revealed only at the end, adds a poignant note to the story, as do the other seniors living isolated lives, surrounded by a beautiful landscape they never notice.

The mystery is resolved by one reveal after another until the final secret is uncovered. The story is built on intelligence rather than action. This is the kind of plot, complex but credible, that mystery lovers crave. Capping it off is Lindsay’s prose, graceful but not flashy, not a word out of place. Fans of British police procedurals (which are typically a good bit more interesting than their American counterparts) should seek out this series.

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Black Widow by Christopher Brookmyre

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on November 1, 2016

Jack Parlabane is an investigative journalist who, as series readers will recall, is not always on good terms with the government. Or, for that matter, with newspaper editors. He’s looking to get back in the game when Peter Elphinstone’s sister asks him to investigate Peter’s presumed death. Also investigating is PC Ali Kazmi. Making an occasional cameo is DS Catherine McLeod, who stars in another series of books by Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre.

Peter’s car went off the road and into a river. Perhaps Peter had an accident, but if he was murdered, the prime suspect is his wife, Diane Jager. Diane is a surgeon who, for a time, blogged about sexism in the medical profession. She blogged anonymously until her blog was hacked and her identity exposed. She experienced blowback due to unfortunate things she said about her colleagues, who were easily identified once her identity was made known.

Jager blamed the fiasco on her employer’s IT technicians, who failed to protect her from hackers. Yet she married Peter, an IT tech, a few years later. Peter was estranged from his father, who happens to be a wealthy and politically connected man from whom Peter was destined to inherit nothing.

Brookmyre does a nice job of showing both Diana’s perspective on her marriage (in the first person) and her husband’s perspective (as filtered through people who knew him). The clever ways in which Brookmyre presents and withholds information make the reader sympathize with one spouse and then the other, without really knowing whether either of them are worth the sympathy. That continues throughout the novel and is, I think, the key to the story’s success. Readers who like clear-cut heroes and villains might dislike Black Widow for that reason, but the ambiguity contributed to my unwavering interest in the story.

Satisfying twists at the end confirm that the journey is worth taking. Some aspects of the ending I managed to guess, but key details came as a true surprise. Whether it was entirely believable is another question, but the story never goes so far over the top as to become outrageously implausible.

Although this is a Parlabane novel, Parlabane is almost a secondary character for most of the story. Early chapters focus on Diane and Peter and their acquaintances. There isn’t as much drama in Parlabane’s life in this novel as in the last one, although he endures a bit of personal drama before the story is over. Parlabane regains center stage toward the end, but Brookmyre’s decision to underplay his role gives the other characters a chance to develop. Brookmyre is a masterful crime writer and Black Widow is a deft performance, both in plot development and in convincing characterizations.

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The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid

First published in the UK by Little, Brown in 2014; published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 2, 2014

I tend to like Val McDermid's plots while disliking her characters. That pattern held true with The Skeleton Road, which is either a stand-alone novel or (more likely) the first in a series.

As has become common in a certain kind of crime novel, DCI Karen Pirie is quick to tell everyone that she cares about crime victims and their grieving families more than anyone else in the police, or possibly the world. Pirie is a self-righteous, judgmental, self-important bully, which makes her a realistic police detective but an annoying character. Pirie is a clone of Paula McIntyre from McDermid's Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, another character I find it difficult to stomach. Fortunately, while Pirie's personality never improves, it becomes more tolerable late in the novel as she encounters the kind of misfortune that builds sympathy for even an unsympathetic character.

McDermid follows the fashion trend of adding a forensic anthropologist to the story. The third woman who takes a leading role is Oxford Professor Maggie Blake, who is haunted by memories of the Balkans and is pining for Mitja Petrovic, a Croatian who disappeared from her life eight years earlier. The fourth central female character is a human rights lawyer who is Blake's best friend. In contrast to the brilliant women who carry the story, most male characters are lazy dullards, officious a-holes, or murderers.

While I wasn't fond of the characters, I enjoyed the two intersecting plotlines. The first requires Pirie to solve the mystery of a skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull, found on the roof of an abandoned building. The second involves Balkan war criminals who are being assassinated before they can be hauled into international court, leading some to suspect that there is a leak in the office that investigates and prosecutes the crimes. They also suspect that Petrovic might be the assassin. Two bumbling and bickering Foreign Office lawyers are assigned to track down the leak.

Early chapters generally alternate the development of the separate plotlines, with interludes narrated by Blake as she recalls the romance with Petrovic that began while she was teaching feminist geopolitics in Croatia. The romance (which leaves Blake "weak in the knees") is too predictable and cheesy to be interesting. On the other hand, various scenes that take place in the Balkans give McDermid the opportunity to showcase the power with which she is capable of writing.

Substantial parts of The Skeleton Road are slow moving. That doesn't bother me when a book's setting, characters, or prose capture my attention, but some stretches of the novel struck me as being dull and unnecessary. Had this been a tighter novel, I would have been a happier reader.

Despite its flaws, The Skeleton Road's plot threads eventually cohere into a strong, engaging story. Some aspects -- particularly the willingness of Police Scotland to send Pirie to Croatia in pursuit of a cold case that has generated no particular suspect -- struck me as wildly implausible, but that's common in modern thrillers. The resolution to the novel's key mystery is telegraphed early and I didn't quite believe the killer's motivation for the killings (much less the killer's ability to commit them, a detail that McDermid ignores). Still, I got caught up in the story during the final chapters and that, together with McDermid's fluid prose, is enough to earn my recommendation.

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