Product Description

A new Logan McRae thriller from the bestselling author of 'Cold Granite', set to rival Ian Rankin. It's summertime in the Granite city: the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and people are dying! It starts with Rosie Williams, a prostitute, stripped naked and beaten to death down by the docks -- the heart of Aberdeen's red light district. For DS Logan McRae it's a bad start to another bad day. Only a few short months ago he was the golden boy of Grampian police. But one botched raid later he's palmed off on a DI everyone knows is a jinx, waiting for the axe to fall with all the other rejects in the 'Screw-up Squad'. Logan's not going to take it lying down. He's determined to escape DI Steel and her unconventional methods, and the best way to do that is to crack the case in double-quick time. But Rosie Williams won't be the only one making an unscheduled trip to the morgue. Across the city six people are burning to death in a petrol-soaked squat, the doors and windows screwed shut from the outside. And despite Logan's best efforts, it's not long before another prostitute turns up on the slab! Stuart MacBride's characteristic grittiness, gallows humour and lively characterization make this his second unputdownable novel, confirming his status as the rising star of crime fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2524 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Review
Praise for 'Dying Light': 'COLD GRANITE was a superb debut and DYING LIGHT is a wonderfully gripping and grim second outing for Logan McRae. Fierce, unflinching and shot through with the blackest of humour; this is crime fiction of the highest order by a writer whose dark star is most definitely on the rise.' Mark Billingham 'Another brilliant, riveting police procedural. I'm green with envy!' R D Wingfield 'The story is violent and bloody; some of the crimes are vicious and MacBride doesn't hold back on the details. But there is plenty of dark humour, and a warmth to the portrayal of the police officers which lightens an otherwise grim tale by this very talented writer.' Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph Praise for 'Cold Granite': "Cold Granite" is a powerful reminder that the best contemporary crime fiction is coming out of Scotland. Ferocious and funny, this is Tartan Noir at its best.' Val McDermid 'A riveting and gruesome debut.' Telegraph 'The latest recruit to the splendid tartan army of crime writers is Stuart MacBride, and he appears with all guns blazing ! this intelligent, exciting police procedural should make the leading writers of the genre start looking over their shoulders.' Sunday Telegraph 'Stuart MacBride goes straight for the jugular with a tight, thrilling novel.' Glasgow Herald Praise for 'Cold Granite': 'MacBride is a confident writer ! does a good line in black humour and has a nose for the macabre. A promising debut.' Scotsman 'An impressive debut ! an edge-of-your-seat page-turner.' Publishers Weekly 'A cracking new writer on the crime scene who hooks you from the first page and never lets you go. The action is ferocious and the pace unrelenting, and yet MacBride manages injections of black humour.' Northern Echo

About the Author
Stuart MacBride has scrubbed toilets offshore, flunked out of university, set up his own graphic design company, got dragged into the heady world of the internet, developed massive applications for the oil industry, drunk heaps of wine and created the perfect recipe for mushroom soup. He lives, just left of the back of beyond, in North-east Scotland, with his wife Fiona and enough potatoes to feed an army.

Customer Reviews

Macbride as his very best, well till next book....
Cold Granite, Stuart Macbride's first novel was only handed to me by a friend as I had nothing to read on a flight and not my usual type of read, however getting throught the first chapters it was obvious my friend was not getting it back. Fantastic Book. Which left me ordering Dying Light before I had finished Cold Granite.

I live in Aberdeen and I'm Ex-Police located at Queen Street which made the book even more interesting, placing myself in the streets, rooms and areas, which Macbride had down to a fine detail. Characters like Logan, Chain smoking DI Steele and Sweetie Munchin Insch make the book with their humour, comments and wit. The story line has you turning the page the second you read the last word, gripping, gruesome, fantastic stuff. I was disappointed when I turned to the last page of the book, I didn't want it to end. I then went onto the internet looking at Stuart Macbride's website to find out when the next release was heading our way. Ha 1st May, Broken Skin.

Stuart Macbride is far my favourite author, great thriller writer, love his humour. Reading comments and flashes on his website and then while reading his books you sense Stuart's personnel humour coming out.

Reading Cold Granite is recommended before reading Dying Light as it gives you a good character build. Excited when Broken Skin came out, I patiently waited 5 days after the launch so that I could meet the author himself to where he signed my eagerly awaited copy of Broken Skin in an Aberdeen bookstore. I was very happy to have met him and despite the gruesome, evil side to his books, he is a very nice, funny man.

Not as strong as expected
There are very many positive reviews of this book and few which rate it negatively. My expectations were therefore high.

I found the first few hundred pages to be very slow (of the `....and then he went to eat a burger....' variety), although the last third or so is quite fast-moving as DS Logan McRae and his colleagues try to wrap up a few crimes. Logan is flawed but very likeable.

But this is basically a police procedural, set in Aberdeen, with some pretty nasty crimes, and language to match, both of which provide some realism. But none of the crimes are complex enough to really challenge the police and lift the level of intrigue for the reader.

The writing is unexceptional but there are some good witty lines in the mix.

In summary, this was an easy read, but certainly not worth writing home about. 7/10

Arson's for gimps
If there's one thing harder then getting your first book published, it's writing the follow-up. A year earlier MacBride enjoyed deserved success with his debut novel COLD GRANITE and he has understandably stuck to a broadly similar theme with this, the second in what we can only assume is a series built around leading man DS Logan McRae. It's good, but it's not radically different from its predecessor. In fact, I thought it was pretty much par for the course but it was uplifted by a better-than-average and satisfying ending.

MacBride relies heavily (and wisely) upon his character creations and in this respect it is probably his greatest strength. We see a lot less of the rather large DI Insch this time round, mainly because McRae has been internally 'demoted' to the less then highly regarded team fronted by a chain-smoking lesbian in the name of DI Roberta Steel. Personally I thought the most amusing aspects of Steel's character had already been used up in the previous novel, and that she has fewer surprises to offer in order to carry this novel as would have been the case with the equally colourful but more credible DI Insch. And some of the often very funny humour that made the debut novel such a success was thinner on the ground throughout this latest tale; a pity, because it is possibly MacBride's second-best skill after his characterisations. It's still funny in places, it's just that there are fewer places. The story itself isn't, in my humble opinion, the most memorable in modern crime fiction but it's always authentic and there's next to no glamourisation of either the crimes, the criminals or the various people whose job it is to hunt them down and capture them. My overall impression before I reached the conclusion was that this was a rather-too-long account of police procedure but when I did read the final pages my impression was lifted; I like stories where there is a degree of ambiguity in the ending, when the reader has to either work things out or simply wonder what actually happened. I generally dislike 'twee' endings in which all the questions are answered in black and white.

It's too late to change the style now, but I do wish that the author could have separated his often 'colourful' language from the words of his characters and the narrative text. Had the story been written in the first person, i.e. from Logan's perspective, it would have made more sense, but as it's third-person all the way I feel that there should have been a change in style to the narrative which did not include any of the raw language for which Aberdeen is apparently well known.