Flesh House is the fourth of Stuart Macbride’s crime novels set in Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan (Lazarus) McRae and I think it is the best to date. This is saying a great deal as all the books are very skillfully written, brimming with tar black humour and as grim as the awful crimes they deal with.
In this book Stuart Macbride has changed the structure from the previous three, previously there was a double plot strand in the books, in this one there is just a single focus for the story. Human flesh is found in a supply of meat being sent to an oil rig and this sparks fears that a violent killer, nicknamed, The Flesher, a old name for a butcher, has resumed his activities. A man had been caught, tried and imprisoned for those crimes, he is now out on appeal and the attacks have re-started. The members of the original investigating team are also being attacked.
There is a very large cast in the book and everyone is given the space and time to establish themselves before increasing numbers of them are killed off.
Any book like this has to do a number of things successfully, the villain has to be sufficiently grotesque to stand out from a very crowed field yet be sufficiently credible to retain the interest of the reader. The challenge to the investigating team has to be huge but not inexplicable, it must unravel in a natural way. Most of all there must be a believable, almost palpable sense of place and context that gives the reader an anchor for the events and allows the events to gain momentum and traction.
Stuart Macbride scores on all these points, in particular with the sense of place that he has been building up over the previous books, Aberdeen and its surroundings have emerged as a distinctive and assertive character in the books and this is very important to the success of the book. The human cast are equally well developed and developing, while Logan McRae is the leading character, he is surrounded by a vividly drawn and bolshie cast who all demand attention and sthrengthen the book.
As for the Flesher and his activities he is a very successful bogeyman in a butchers apron and a Margret Thatcher mask. While his activities are described in awful detail, he remains a shadowy figure and all the better for it. There is a sort of explanation, it is not convincing and could easily and profitably have been dropped from the book.
Overall this is a griping, bloody and melancholy book, it is a terrific read.
