‘Keep the Midnight Out’ by Alex Gray

Published by Sphere,
5 November  2015.
ISBN: 978-0-7515-5487-8 (PB)

Detective Superintendent  William Lorimer has taken a break from Glasgow to enjoy with his wife Maggie a holiday on the beautiful Isle of Mull, one of their favourite places. But taking his first early morning walk his tranquillity is abruptly shattered by the discovery of the naked body of a red-haired man.

 This is the twelfth book in the series featuring William Lorimer, now a Superintendent. But the sight and markings on the corpse takes Lorimer back twenty years to when he was a new detective constable, and to another young man who had been murdered. That he had failed to solve the case had remained with him through the years. An inch he was unable to scratch.

The case is handled by DI Stevie Crozier of the local police.  Aware that he is out of his area and has no power to interfere in the investigation Lorimer does his best to keep on DI Crozier’s good side so as at least to be keep abreast of developments.  But it grows increasingly more difficult for Lorimer as the investigation proceeds and the similarities between this and his old case become more obvious.  But could this be same killer, two decades on?

Whilst the hunt for the killer provides the reader with a gripping mystery, the flashbacks to Lorimer’s early career is as equally absorbing.  And personally this is a special time for Lorimer and Maggie, quite newly married.  The back story is moving, and the search for the killer dramatic as the story switches between the Mull killing and Lorimer’s cold case in Glasgow of twenty years earlier.  Highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes

Alex Gray born 27 May 1950, Glasgow, is a Scottish crime writer. She was brought up in the Craigbank area of Glasgow and attended Hutchesons' Grammar School. She studied English and Philosophy at Strathclyde University and worked for a period in the  Department of Heaklth & Social Security before training as an English teacher. In 1976 she lived in Rhodesia for three months, during which time she got married, and she and her husband returned to Scotland. She continued teaching until the 1990s, when she gave the profession up and began to write full-time. Alex is a member of the Femmes Fatales crime writing trio, together with Alanna Knight and Lin Anderson .She has published six novels, all set around Glasgow and featuring the character of Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer and his psychological profiler Solomon Brightman, the earlier novels being published by Canongate and later books by Little Brown. She has also written several magazine articles.

www.alex-gray.com/‎