Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite, Logan McRae #1: Gritty and propulsive
Cold Granite is the gritty and propulsive crime novel that kicks off Stuart MacBride’s bestselling Logan McRae series set in Aberdeen Scotland. Read my review.
Publication: First published in 2005. This edition by HarperCollins Australia, 2018
Genre: Crime-Detective, Mystery, Thriller, Action, Drama
Cold Granite Publisher Synopsis
Logan McRae, Book 1
DS Logan McRae and the police in Aberdeen hunt a child killer who stalks the frozen streets.
Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather…
It’s DS Logan McRae’s first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn’t get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid’s body is discovered in a ditch: strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he’s only the first. There’s a serial killer stalking the Granite City and the local media are baying for blood.
Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die. And if Logan isn’t careful, he could end up joining them.
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My Review
Recently I consciously took a step back from the shiny new releases and made time for this ‘first novel in a bestselling series’ that I’d always wanted to read but had just never got around to.
Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite begins with one of the more impactful opening chapters I have read, which ends with:
A smile spread across his lips like fire in a burning building. He really should take his medication, but not now. Not yet. Not when there were so many dead things to enjoy.
Macbride’s efficiently evocative writing style and characterisation, and with it the compulsion to read further despite the darkness, just continues to build from there.
Some of my favourite highlights:
Everyone looked murderous and inbred. When the sun shone they would cast off their thick woollens, unscrew their faces, and smile. But in winter the whole city looked like a casting call for Deliverance.
and
The rest of him looked as if it had been thrown together on a Monday morning before the factory was properly awake.
and
It was a nice enough house on the inside, if you didn’t mind concussing your cat.
.
As you can see from these excepts, the city of Aberdeen itself and its winter’s overbearing influence plays a very important role in Cold Granite. It amplifies the mood and degree of difficulty for the police investigation tenfold.
DS Logan McRae’s perspective is about as world-weary and dark humoured as you’d expect from a detective returning to the job that had led to him almost being killed. In terms of lead character types, he’s that fallible underdog that ultimately continues to push on despite his scarred body and brain telling him to say, “F *** it”. He doggedly tries to uphold justice despite seeing karma pass himself and others by time after time.
In Cold Granite Stuart MacBride also introduces some other great authentically flawed, oddball characters and a nice little side dose of relationship drama to balance the otherwise heavy topics at play in this series. The competing policing priorities the cast find themselves responding to and the interweaving complexity of the criminal investigations feel far less tidy, and hence more believable, than your average crime novel. It is longer than your typical crime thriller too.
But let us tackle the elephant in the room – this novel’s subject matter. Those without strong stomachs and/or who are triggered by crimes against children should probably give this novel a miss. The crimes perpetrated are brutal and the depiction of bodily trauma equally so.
.
That all said, the gritty authenticity of this policing perspective makes for extremely compelling reading. For me, Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite was a bonafide page turner. I would very easily have immediately downloaded Book 2 Dying Light, had I not had another new release I’d committed to reviewing patiently waiting for my attention.
This experience proves once again that good writing has no expiry date. Mature readers understand novels embody the norms and technologies of the time and appreciate the capturing of that moment and mood. I am vowing to better balance my new and old reading in the year ahead.
More highly recommended propulsive and gritty crime novels
Click on book covers for full reviews of each novel.
