Flesh House

First Line: "No, you listen to me: if my six-year-old son isn't back here in ten minutes I'm going to come round there and rip you a new arsehole, are we clear?" When the newest Stuart MacBride mystery arrives here, I feel as though Fort Knox has just delivered another gold bar. Yes, I love these books, but if a blend of (often) black humor and very gruesome scenes aren't your thing, save yourself some time and skip this review (and the book). Detective Sergeant Logan McRae works the mean streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, and he'd probably tell you that police headquarters is often more dire than the streets. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, a strong sense of duty, and he often has brilliant flashes of intuition. He is also a piece of taffy pulled between two of the most obnoxious detective inspectors you'll ever find in crime fiction-- and they both have death grips on him. If I were McRae, sooner or later I'd snap and wear my "Some Mornings It's Not Worth Chewing Through the Restraints" t-shirt to work where I'd tell both inspectors exactly what I thought of them as I turned in my warrant card. Twenty years ago "The Flesher" was butchering people all over the UK until the Grampian Police put him in prison. It's eleven years later, he's out on appeal, and now he's missing and people are being turned into oven-ready joints again. When members of the original investigation team begin disappearing, McRae realizes that the case might not be as clear cut as everyone else seems to think. Flesh House begins slowly and continues to build-- typical MacBride. Most of the humor is in the first half of the book. I've begun to think of this as a diversionary tactic. MacBride wants you to keep laughing while he moves his chess pieces into position all over the board. Hopefully by the time you wipe the tears from your eyes and calm down, his trap is set and you don't have a prayer of escape. Me? I'm a sheep to the slaughter when it comes to this particular crime fiction writer. He can be hilarious. I'll give you a few examples: "Logan had met their state-of-the-art security system-- it was a sixty-eight-year-old man called Harold. Logan had sneezed more alert things than him." "Which sounded incredibly unlikely to Logan: Insch wouldn't ask for help if his crotch was on fire. From the look on her face, Isobel didn't believe it either." "As Logan watched, Detective Constable Simon Rennie boogied his way past them, doing a pretty good impersonation of an octopus being electrocuted." This is MacBride's most complex mystery yet, and since cannibalism is one of the strong themes running throughout the book, I'm wondering how many fans he lost with Flesh House . He definitely doesn't sugar coat the theme. (I have a very high tolerance of such things, and it even bothered me a time or two.) But I kept reading because I love his writing and I love the character of Logan McRae. The slapstick, the underlying seriousness, the gruesome scenes are

I really loved this novel, especially because it was gory. Very gory. The gore and ick was so juicily described that I swear that McBride's cat wrote the book. His cat is a predatorkitty (check his blog), and she would like to read stuff like "Flesh House". Since I like cats, like crime, like tartan noir novels and like gory icky stuff, it was the perfect combination.

What a disturbing, gruesome and incredibly engrossing book. I couldn't put it down, though it can be a little hard to follow in places. The detail and characters are very rich and complex. I'm still not sure about the ending, but the characters - DS McRae, Insch, Steel, Rennie, Jackie, etc. are so real and the villians are sooooo villaneous! If this is your first MacBride book, stop and read Cold Granite or one of the others first. They are a little easier to take. Then read this one. MacBride has an incredible imagination and if you are a fan of this genre, you'll find his books well worth the effort. Be warned, they are not the "Ed McBain" police procedural - they are so much more intense.

In this bizarre and macabre novel, Stuart MacBride introduces us to a serial killer murdering and dismembering victims and distributing body parts into the food chain. The Aberdeen police are at their wit's ends in identifying and capturing the perpetrator. They do apprehend a man they believe to be "the Flesher" (he was captured and convicted 20 years before, but recently released on a technicality]. While they have him in custody, the murders go on. Then members of the original investigation decades earlier begin to disappear and DS Logan McRae starts to think in new directions, despite the usual antics of DIs Insch and Steele. Written with panache, the novel is fairly long and the reader is treated to all sorts of information about abattoirs and meat processing, perhaps more than one might wish for. But as murder mysteries go, this novel is right up there with the best of them, and it is highly recommended.

This is one book that grabs you by the throat and won't let you go. Not to mention that it has many more twists and turns than the average amusement ride. Over twenty years ago, the serial killer called the Flesher stalked and killed in Scotland. The police thought they caught the man, and Insch, who was in charge of the case, was deeply upset that never find the evidence to pin all the killings on Wiseman. Now Wiseman is out of jail and once again the bodies begin to pile up. Worse, much worse, body parts appear in butcher shops. The story line is as terrifying as it gets, and the number of the murdered is truly astonishing.