One of his first assignments is to notify the mother of three-year-old David Reid that her missing son has been found dead. When he and a female constable, WPC Watson, arrive at the house, they learn that a newspaper journalist has already called for comment before them.

Later Logan accompanies a environmental officer to a rural home to serve papers on the owner. There they find several steadings (farm outbuildings) filled with dead animals. The owner, Bernard Duncan “Roadkill” Philips who is mentally ill, collects dead animals from the roads and stores them. The stench is overwhelming.

WPC Watson has worked on a case of a suspected child molester, but at trial the defense attorney is destroying the prosecution’s witnesses. A conviction is looking less certain

David Reid is only the first child to become a police case. Another boy goes missing soon after. A trash collector finds the body of a little girl in a trash bin. And while cleaning out Roadkill’s gruesome remains, another little girl’s body is discovered. Are the cases connected? The police worry that a serial pedophile murderer may be responsible.

Yet another mystery presents itself; the dead body of a man with his kneecaps hacked off is found in the river. Logan learns from the journalist who had broken the story about David Reid, Colin Miller, the name of the victim and that he was an enforcer for a bookie.

Meanwhile, newspaper stories continue to reveal crime details known only to the police; public opinion is turning against the department. Logan’s romance with pathologist Dr. Isobel McAlister is unquestionably over, and his interest in WPC Watson is not progressing smoothly. His working relationship with DI Insch is thorny. It’s proving to be a rough reintroduction to duty.

That list may seem like a lot of subplots for a single book, but those are only the primary ones – there are still others in this complexly plotted work. In many police procedural mysteries, even in the largest metropolis the entire police department appears to have the luxury of only one mystery to solve by the end of the book. In real life, of course, police departments have multiple cases to handle simultaneously. Cold Granite provides a more realistic look at the workings of a large police department than is often seen in fiction. Unlike real life, however, everything does come together satisfactorily at the end.

This is the author’s debut work, but in the beginning I felt as though I’d come into the story midway. Some back-story details are only gradually and sparingly divulged. Moreover, there is a period of adjustment for an American reader to become accustomed to Scottish terms, abbreviations, and rules. Even for one who has read multiple English police procedural mysteries, there are some unfamiliar aspects. It took a while for me to feel comfortable in unfamiliar terrain, but once the various characters and subplots become well established, Cold Granite is a first-rate police procedural.

Detective Sergeant Logan McRae is the main character, but over the course of the narrative other characters become multi-dimensional, even some of the least sympathetic. It is to be hoped that the author didn’t create this whole set of characters and relationships only to abandon them in future works. If this is just the first work in a series, it’s definitely a promising start. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Cold Granite is strongly recommended for fans of police procedural mysteries.

--Lesley Dunlap