When the story telling and humour are no more - 1 - star

A claw-foot bath dominated one wall, topped by a mildewed shower-curtain. Crusts of dark-orange and brown limescale around the drain. Lid and seat up on the toilet, showing off a whole Formula-One- season of skid marks.” There you have it, the writing style of Stuart MacBride enriched with toilet humour, rude rather than crude remarks, a list of very colourful and dur Scottish characters hidden loosely under crime/noir. Now let me say from the start I have been reading this authors books from the early days of Cold Granite, the first Logan McCrea novel and have always found his style refreshing and indeed at times highly amusing (who could forget DCI Roberta Steel and her testing sense of humour most of it at the expense of Logan who she rather fondly called Laz :)

In “The dead of Winter '' two officers DC Reekie and his boss DI Victoria (Bigtoria) Montgomery-Porter are delivering a dying prisoner Mark Bishop to the remote Scottish village of Glenfarach to live his remaining short years in a more open environment. There are 200 other offenders incarcerated here, having committed many crimes of a sexual nature, murder, and embezzlement. The weather is closing in and the officers wish to return asap to Aberdeen before threatened blizzards make an appearance. Unfortunately this will not happen as a murder in the style of an execution has occurred and with 200 (now 199!) suspects Reekie and Porter will need to be resolute and strong before the perpetrator strikes again. There is very little hope of any outside help arriving as Glenfarach quickly becomes snowbound. I am afraid what I once found exciting and new in the author’s writing I now find laborious and tedious. What once was crisp and humorous has now become lewd and tired. The crime and noir has been replaced by a slapdash style as our 2 headless chickens investigate in a way reminiscent of the Marx Bros. Thank you to the good people at netgalley for a gratis copy in return for an honest review and that is what I have written.