Published by Constable and Robinson Ltd,
September 2013.
ISBN: 978-1780337791
St Andrews: championship golf course, high-profile university, beautiful town in
equally beautiful setting. It’s a place I’ve never visited, but that’s the image
it presents. It has always struck me as a quiet, rural sort of place,
especially since it was deemed a suitable location for the once-removed heir to
the throne to complete his education.
After
reading T F Muir’s Life for a Life, I began to think Prince William was
lucky to escape with his skin intact. It starts with the discovery of the
battered body of a young girl, and gets steadily bloodier. Enter DCI Andy
Gilchrist, to head up the murder enquiry.
Muir
is an author who doesn’t pull his punches. Graphic descriptions of murdered
bodies abound. The reader is subjected, along with the protagonist, to a
detailed, gory account of a video of a killing by decapitation. And the body
count, for a quiet, rural sort of place, is phenomenal.
Apparently
this peaceful corner of Scotland – which Muir brings to shivering life in the
course of an Arctic winter – is a hotbed
of organized crime: rape, people trafficking, prostitution, gang warfare: you
name it, St Andrews is rife with it.
As
fictional detectives go, Gilchrist isn’t out of the ordinary: dysfunctional
family, failed marriage, a bit too fond of a dram, ill at ease with his
feelings. It’s the supporting characters who provide the spice of variety,
especially the women in his life. There’s Nance, detective sergeant, and
clearly part of his emotional history. Becky Cooper, glamorous pathologist, is
the current temptation, but unfortunately married. And Jessie Janes, another
detective sergeant and newly arrived from Glasgow,
is mouthy and abrasive with family and secrets which make her almost as
dysfunctional as Glichrist himself.
The
narrative is peppered with equally interesting minor players. On the side of
the angels are Mhairi, detective constable, who stays mainly in the background
but reveals hidden depths, luckily for her boss; Jackie the disabled
researcher; and Janes’s teenage son, profoundly deaf Robert with a talent for
writing comedy, who has huge potential for development. The bad guys are
equally well drawn, from Angus the hapless estate agent through provocative
Caryl Dillanos to Kumar, the pyschopathic criminal mastermind who remains a
shadow until... well, you’ll have to read it to find out.
It’s
the fourth in a series, well written though a little inclined towards
over-explanation in places, and there are references throughout to
investigations and relationships in the earlier books. Given the picturesque
surroundings and the colourful cast, Gilchrist is a cop who is ripe for the TV
treatment; John Hannah springs to mind, though David Tennant would do nicely is
he was free. Though perhaps viewers could do without quite as much gory detail.
------
Reviewer: Lynne
Patrick
T F Muir Born in Glasgow,
Scotland, Frank
was plagued from a young age with the urge to see more of the world than the
rain sodden slopes of the Campsie Fells. By the time he graduated from
University with a degree he hated, he’d already had more jobs than the River
Clyde has bends. Short stints as a lumberjack in the Scottish Highlands
and a moulder’s labourer in the local foundry convinced Frank that his degree
was not such a bad idea after all. Thirty-plus years of living and
working overseas helped him appreciate the raw beauty of his home
country. Now a dual US/UK citizen, Frank makes his home in the outskirts
of Glasgow, from where he visits St Andrews regularly to carry out some serious research
in the old grey town’s many pubs and restaurants. Frank is working hard
on his next novel, another crime story suffused with dark alleyways and cobbled
streets and some things gruesome.
http://www.frankmuir.co.uk
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.
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