I did like the main character and particularly the unflattering portrayal of his ex-lover. All the missing littlies - I found it a little hard to follow who was who sometimes, but perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention. Aberdeen in winter was brilliantly written. I will look out for more in this series. - Fiona ( )

Great series - great characters - humorous at times but hard ( )

Typical crime drama. I've read so many of these now they are getting a sameness about them. ( )

Read August 2008

Not quite Ian Rankin but not bad. ( )

A police procedural of the more or less hard boiled type. Set in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Detective Sergeant Logan MacRae has returned from recovering from near-fatal stab wounds to the Grampian Police Force to face immediately a dead child and the possibility of a serial paedophile killer. Other dead children appear as well as a puzzling adult corpse, causing more than a little confusion within the police ranks. In addition, it’s clear that someone inside the Grampian Police Force is giving inside information to a notorious journalist.

While not consciously a spin-off of Ian Rankin’s series, this is close enough to merit comparison. And comes up lacking in almost every respect. MacBride does a very good plot, but his writing runs the spectrum from pathetic to adequate to “precious”. Someone either told him or he learned in a writing course that you have to be clever with words to stand out from the crowd, and MacBride took this too much to heart. For example, there is the use of the verb, ‘to sulk”. A house sulked, the sky sulked, something else sulked. None of it worked. Another example: “she scrabbled backward”. Scrabbled?? No.

There are some good parts. MacBride does a good job in writing about the more or less adolescent interactions between members of the police force, which I found believable enough. He uses quite a few Aberdonian words, such as ‘shoogled’ (to scoot along a bench or seat) that lend a nice atmosphere to the story. His descriptions of the weather convinced me never to visit Aberdeen. His characters have potential but he simply does not know how to handle them. One character in particular was really well done, though—a female Detective Inspector who turns out to be quite a womanizer!

The denouement was weak enough, but the writing was so awkward and inadequate that it made the ending almost boring.

The "granite" of the title refers to the traditional building material of Aberdeen. The cover art bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything that occurs within the story.

This debut novel is so awkward that I have no desire to read any further in the series. ( )