The Coffin Maker's Garden
A village on the edge…
As a massive storm batters the Scottish coast, Gordon Smith’s home is falling into the North Sea. But the crumbling headland has revealed what he’s got buried in his garden: human remains.
A house full of secrets…
With the storm still raging, it’s too dangerous to retrieve the bodies and waves are devouring the evidence. Which means no one knows how many people Smith’s already killed and how many more he’ll kill if he can’t be stopped.
An investigator with nothing to lose…
The media are baying for blood, the top brass are after a scapegoat, and ex-Detective Inspector Ash Henderson is done playing nice. He’s got a killer to catch, and God help anyone who gets in his way.
I used to really like Stuart MacBride, the first Logan McRae books were very good, but then they just got to be predictably violent. So I thought I would give Ash Henderson a try out, I've not read the first two so I'm missing some of the back story but I didn't feel that was too important.
The story starts out with the predictably bad Scottish weather and a house falling into the sea, but not before it reveals that their are bodies buried in the garden. It's down to Ash to find out where Gordon Smith is and also to find where the granddaughter of his next door neighbour is.
There is also the second story of children being murdered and Alice is the profiler trying to help find out who that is.
It all becomes very violent and very unbelievable towards the end.
My copy, while being a pre release copy, used lots of text language but the SEND and other messages were sometimes in mixed capitals and lower case and all squashed together and very small and that made it difficult to read. There were also a couple of sections at about 34% and 40% where the narrative repeated itself and was all jumbled up and made no sense at all.
One of my biggest bug bears with Stuart MacBride is, that although this was a British English copy, most of the words like colour were spelt the British way, he insists on using the word "careening". The proper British English spelling is "careering" as in the car careered off the road. Careen in British English is to be rolled on your side and have your bottom scrubbed, that is if you are a boat.
Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher from my ARC in return for an honest review.