A Taste for Malice, the first review

We were very impressed with Michael J Malone's 2012 debut crime novel, Blood Tears, which introduced the highly dysfunctional protagonist (even by the standards of the genre) Detective Inspector Ray McBain. So we approached A Taste for Malice with some trepidation: would Michael J Malone be able to produce a second novel that lived up to the promise of the first?

The answer is a clear "yes": he has. He has also produced one of the more unusual detective novels we can remember reading. Most crime novels kick off with a dead body within the first few pages, and build from there. What is particularly fascinating about A Taste for Malice is that the story does not revolve around the tracking down of a killer or serial killer. Yes, there is a murder between the covers, but it's very much "off stage", and DI McBain's involvement is only peripheral (though it is also critical). But the central story, which develops in two parallel strands that steadily converge as the book moves towards its climax, deals with something altogether less wholesome.

We first encounter DI Ray McBain as he returns to work after the events in the earlier novel. The physical scars he has been left with are healing, but the mental scars still run very deep. McBain has other problems. His superiors do not wish to risk his fragile mental health by exposing him to the full rigors of the work of a Detective Inspector, so he is attached to a team led by a man who used to be his junior officer, and tasked with administrative tasks that have little interest and no challenge for him. One of the files he looks at deals with the harming of two children by a woman the family thought could be trusted to look after them. Then another similar case emerges. McBain sets out to discover whether the two cases are linked, behind the backs and against the wishes of his senior officers. Meanwhile his personal life is as chaotic as ever, and he also begins to fear that his nemesis from Blood Tears may be waiting in the shadows.

In parallel we follow the story of a family having difficulty coping with the mother's loss of memory in an accident, and their befriending by a young woman. The reader's suspicions that all is not right build steadily, and the two strands of the story come together very satisfyingly in a conclusion that offers some genuine surprises.

Courtesy of Undiscovered Scotland

New from Five Leaves, Father Confessor by Russel D McLean

Rather than just announce the book - here's its first review, from our friends - and after this review, our special friends - at www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk. No, the cover is not sponsored by Sheila's Nails of Craigiebank.

"Father Confessor is Russel D McLean's third outing for Dundee-based private investigator J McNee, and the result is a superbly well told and compelling book that grabs you by the throat within the first few pages, and doesn't let you go until you've reached the climax. We've reviewed the two earlier books in the series, The Good Son and The Lost Sister and both were very good. Father Confessor is even better. Russel D McLean has produced a polished and highly accomplished piece of crime fiction that has lost none of the grittiness and sense of place of its predecessors, yet somehow feels more rounded and complete.

McNee's nemesis, Detective Inspector George Lindsay, the man whose nose McNee's was kicked out of the police force for breaking, is trying to find McNee's girlfriend Susan Bright, to let her know that her father, DCI Ernie Bright, has been killed in the line of duty. Susan is a detective sergeant who has been suspended from duty pending an investigation into the events at the conclusion of The Lost Sister. And now her father is dead. Still worse, the circumstances of his death raise suspicions Ernie Bright was corrupt, something McNee already feared.
DCI Bright had been McNee's mentor before his dismissal from Tayside Police, and now McNee feels he owes it to Bright, and to his daughter, to find out who was responsible for the killing. And then leading Dundee gangster David Burns turns up in McNee's office offering to pay him handsomely to investigate the same killing. What really lies behind the links between DCI Bright and David Burns, and how much of what Burns is saying about the background to Bright's final investigation, the one that got him killed, can McNee believe? Suddenly the certainties of right and wrong begin to look less certain, and things become still more dangerous when the one man McNee feels, however reluctantly, he can trust, is removed from the picture in the most brutal manner possible.
On the evidence of Father Confessor, there is a lot of mileage left yet in J McNee, and was that a hint of a slight change of future direction we picked up on the final page? We await his next outing with keen anticipation."