This week I'd like to recommend two books the first is ...

The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas by Chris Ewan   Pocket Books ISBN 978-1-84739-956-4 RRP£7.99

Charlie Howard is what you would get if you crossed Sam Spade with Bertie Wooster and gave him a set of skeleton keys. A wonderful romp with touches of rampant violence and a pair of over the top psychopaths who just happen to own the casino that Charlie decides to steal from. Add his literary agent Victoria who isn't exactly who he thinks she is, a murdered magician and a person of restricted growth and you have a wonderfully entertaining book...just right for that hour or two by the pool or when you are becalmed in some featureless holding pen while you await your next flight. 

The second book is much meatier and a lot darker... 

Cold Granite by Stuart McBride          Harper Collins ISBN 978-0-00-719314-1      RRP £6.99

Four year old David Reid is dicovered in a ditch, he's been strangled, stripped and mutilated. A killer is stalking the Granite City preying on the young and vulnerable and the press are having a field day. DS Logan finds himself in the thick of it despite it being his first day back after a year off sick and realises that he may be the only one that thinks that the obvious culprit may be anything but.

 

I will admit that until I went to hear Stuart McBride talk about his books I hadn't actually read any. in fact I'd pass them on the shelf. However when asked which writer was his favourite, McBride mentioned R D Wingfield. Now I love Wingfield, have done for years, read everything I can get my grimy little paws on and I've read them more than once...so I thought maybe the lads worth reading after all...and he is...I started off with Cold Granite and have worked my way through Broken Skin and Flesh house as well.

Bottom line...this man can write the most convoluted and satisfying of plots which actually feel real. Although we frequently visit parts of Scotland and live on the Isle of Man, which used to be part of the Duke of Atholls estate, I've never been to Aberdeen. But from what friends have told me, the ones that live there, he's got Aberdeen bang to rights in particular the weather...Apparently it rains a lot and when it isn't raining it snows...or even worse is thinking about it. There is a great feel for place in the book, a wonderful sense of style and humour and a wicked poking at the press and the powers that be.

Cold Granite is all in all a very readable and meaty book setting the scene for the rest of the series so far. The characters are a mixed bag of likeable and wouldn't want to work with if you paid me. DS Logan McRae is the put upon and very human policeman trying to solve the unsolveable, constantly torn between two impossible bosses, in the form of the increasingly apoplectic, sweet mangling, loud mouthed DI Insch and the equally loud chain smoking lesbian DI Steele.  His love interest the leggy 'ball breaker' WPC Watson comes into her own as the series progresses, particularly in the third book Broken Skin. Broken Skin is possibly my favourite so far...although it may have more to do with my anti-football feelings...And Flesh House nearly made me seriously consider becoming a vegetarian. You have been warned!