I am very familiar with Stuart MacBride’s writing and used to the mixture of interesting characters, twisty plots and zany dialogue so I was really looking forward to his latest offering, This was a novel that the more I read the more I enjoyed it. The characters grew as the story developed and became a very enjoyable read. 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. Although this is much better than his last book (No Less the Devil), it again falls far short of his previous many books. 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 :) 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.

And so to UNIVERSITY, far too young, naive and stupid to be away from the family home, sharing a subterranean flat in one of the seedier bits of Edinburgh with a mad Irishman, and four other bizarre individuals. The highlight of walking to the art school in the mornings (yes: we were students, but we still did mornings) was trying not to tread in the fresh bloodstains outside our front door, and dodging the undercover CID officers trying to buy drugs. Lovely place. 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...

Despite this, I’m not put off the author’s books and I’m hopeful he’ll return to his usual form soon. 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. 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. A policeman is stranded in a town full of ex-convicts in the darkly entertaining new crime novel from number one Sunday Times bestselling author Stuart MacBride.

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. Perhaps I’d have found more to like if the narration of the lead female cop was better. Although Greg McHugh was very skilled with everyone else, his ‘voice’ for this DI sounded very amateurish and quashed any life the character might have had. But, in the meantime, I had to get on with the day job and produce a proper full-length police thriller. One that didn’t include haunted funfairs, mummies, or anatomically impossible taxidermy. And still the question remained: what the hell was I going to do about the pandemic? Have to admit, this isn’t exactly the funeral I thought I’d end up with. I’d kinda hoped for more mourners, maybe a few tears, some inspiring speeches about what a great guy I was. Distraught wife, two-point-four inconsolable children, and a heartbroken golden retriever. It’s an old man, sounding every bit as cold and sharp as Bigtoria, but where her accent is posh-girl Scottish, his is gravelly Glaswegian. Redolent with tenements, whisky, and putting the boot in. ‘Is it done?’Now I am a huge fan of Stuart MacBride, and absolutely adore his Logan MacRae novels, however in recent years Stuart has been writing more standalone novels, and The Dead Of Winter is one. 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. I have enjoyed a number of Stuart MacBride's books before; I enjoy his writing style, his dark sense of humour, twisty plots and excellent characters - The Dead of Winter is no different and I loved it. The storyline is unique and intriguing and I was instantly drawn in. To be honest, I've never before read anything quite like this. There are some really good, creative and colourful scenes with multiple twists and turns all written in a smart ironic, sardonic tone with excellent dialogue to match. There’s multiple double , treble, quadruple crossings so you have no idea which colourful character to trust, not that I would dare to say that Bigtoria’s face!

I absolutely raced through The Dead Of Winter and i love love loved it! The writing style that Stuart MacBride has is unique in the crime fiction genre, others try to do something similar but no one can write like Stuart MacBride does. The aplomb, that he writes murder and gruesomeness in one sentence and then sarcastic humor in another is exceptional. Having myself, worked for the Police for 12 years in the 1990s, I’m well aware of the dark humor used in extreme situations to lift the pressure, Stuart writes that in such a realistic way it’s superb. So I’m a huge Stuart MacBride Fan. I’ve read all the Logan books. Enjoyed them all. I didn’t even mind the last standalone which was pretty wild. So I knew what to expect. I was excited so why do I feel so disappointed? But there was always the writing (well, that's not true, the writing only started two chapters above this one). I fell victim to that most dreadful of things: peer pressure. Two friends were writing novels and I thought, 'why not? I could do that'. Bigtoria tumbles Edward into the pit. Stands there, staring down at him for a moment, head on one side. Shovel held like an executioner’s axe. Then she grunts. Grabs her high-vis from the branch.Dave swapped his police dreams for a wheelchair, and I swapped mine for a warrant card. Cos that’s what you do when your dad’s a cop, and his dad before him, and his dad before that. About three years ago I discovered Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae novels, and devoured the entire 12-novel series within a year. Since then, I’ve read his Ash Henderson series and several standalone books. MacBride has become one of my favourite authors. Fiona’s opinion on this one was, we’re all living through it, no one wants to read about it. What we need is something to lift us out of our current predicament. Something fun. Something that would make people laugh. 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.) I’m not a fan of the other narrator, Cathleen McCarron. I find her breathy, slow, over performed narration very irritating in general, but to be honest in this book - although she did that - it wasn’t quite as pronounced as it usually is.