The Dead of Winter: The chilling new thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Logan McRae series

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The storyline is unique and intriguing and I was instantly drawn in. To be honest, I've never before read anything quite like this. Full of dark humour, violence, gore and unsavoury characters along with a fast paced plot full of twists and turns, this was a book I really enjoyed. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, moments that make you wince and several "no way" moments that had me swiping my screen at a great rate of knots desperate to find out how it was all going to end but also not wanting it to.

Barely a chapter into this book and I was hooked with a brilliantly concived twist that I wasn't expecting and, the writing just got better from there on in. Sorry – where are my manners? The lady doing the digging is one Detective Inspector Victoria Elizabeth Montgomery-Porter, North East Division. Some people call her ‘Bigtoria’, but never to her face. My big brother, Dave, he was the one meant to follow the family tradition and join up, but a drunk driver blew straight through the Holburn Street junction, and that was that. Right from the very beginning Stuart MacBride yanks you into the intriguing storyline and keeps you gripped in the icy hands of a tense, fast paced and unpredictable plot. It’s a very clever combination of excellent humour (I laugh out loud, titter and snort my way through the blood and gore!) and a darkly enigmatic puzzling mystery with an investigation that seems hindered at every turn.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 :) The weather's closing in, tensions are mounting, and time's running out - something nasty has come to Glenfarach, and Edward is standing right in its way... There’s still an element of ‘crime fiction as a mirror’ about it, but a lot of ‘crime fiction as an escape’ too. Maybe not quite as much of an escape as Tufty the Vampire Slayer, or The Horrible Haunting of Tartan Haggis MacFunland, but an escape nonetheless. Some reviewers have complained that MacBride is only recycling his Logan McRae series by changing the character names. Yes, Reekie is rather a close match for McRae, but Bigtoria is not at all like McRae’s nemesis DI Roberta Steele—other than the fact that both are high-ranking female officers. There is the comedy, true, which comes mainly at the expense of placing Reekie in untenable situations. And this is primarily why I can only give THE DEAD OF WINTER four stars. I prefer the edgy directions that MacBride has been exploring in his latest novels, which are not just comedy cop sagas. They provide comedy plus social commentary. The social commentary is missing here.

You’d think that things wouldn’t have changed all that much for writers. Yes, we can’t get out to do events at festivals and libraries and bookshops anymore, but we’re mostly homebodies anyway, so what is there to whinge about? This is just business-as-usual. Only it really hasn’t been. There are a few plot twists, although I guessed who the murderer was very early in the tale. Other revelations were somewhat of a surprise, but were not completely startling. Most of the readability comes from the dilemmas that Reekie lands in. He is continually cold, miserable, and wet. (There are 285 references to “snow” in THE DEAD OF WINTER, 62 references to “cold”, and numerous mentions of related concepts such as “freezing”, “wet”, “shiver”, etc.)What should have been a straight forward assignment for Detective Constable Edward Reekie turned out to be far more. His task was to collect a dying prisoner from HMP Grampian and deliver him to Glenfarach to live out his last remaining days in peace. Everything is calm and still and crisp, marred only by a line of deep footprints and a smooth-edged scar where something heavy has been dragged through the drifts.

Silence falls with the snow, settling into the landscape. Now the only sounds are the babbling burn, the jagged cawing of a distant crow, and Bigtoria’s breathing. In and out like angry bellows.An electronic twiddling noise bursts into life somewhere nearby. It’s a cheap one-note-at-a-time rendition of that olde-worlde circus theme tune: Yata, yadda yadda, yata yaaaaaa da. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Bantam Press via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Dead of Winter by Stuart MacBride for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.