Logan MacRae is still banished to the outskirts of Aberdeenshire, back in uniform leaving a local division of officers, but life is by no means simpler. When a body is found dumped in the woods, it has all the hallmarks of one of Scotland’s crime lords, meaning the full force of Aberdeen’s CID descending on Logan’s patch, including his old boss, DCI Roberta Steel.

And that’s just the beginning of things. As well as dealing with the intrusion of the Aberdeen squad, Logan is pressured to conduct an internal investigation into an old investigation of Steel, he has to deal with finally switching off his partner’s life support… but worst of all, Wee Hamish Mowat, the Aberdeen crime overlord is dying. Rival gangs are lining up to take over his operations, but he has a clear idea of who should be his heir… Logan MacRae himself…

Well, it’s been a while – eight years in fact – since I’ve caught up with Logan MacRae in The Missing And The Dead. It’s not the first long break I’ve taken from this series – a series, it should be said, I really enjoy – and there’s a pretty simple reason. These are long books, much longer than your usual crime novels, and given I inflict myself with reading targets, I need to find time to put aside to read them. It’s stupid, I know – and it’s not as if my sometimes-limited attention span is a problem with Stuart’s books, because they are so readable. So when I find myself on holiday in a cottage with no TV or devices, bar my Kindle, and had already ploughed through four books in two days, I figured this was the ideal time to pop back to Aberdeen.

This isn’t a standard whodunnit, by the way. It’s basically the story of Logan trying to make his way through some incredibly difficult decisions, with his life, his conscience and his career in one piece – not easy when a psychopathic gangster is after you and it seems to be kill or be killed. And the book and the character are dark enough that you never quite know how far Logan is going to go.

It’s a great read, utterly absorbing and I still ploughed through it quickly despite the page count. There are a number of genuine shocks and surprises along the way and I really want to see what happens next – either in Steel’s standalone novel, Now We Are Dead, or MacRae’s next outing, The Blood Road. Luckily I’ve got another week in device isolation – sorry, I mean on a lovely holiday in the middle of nowhere – at the end of August. It’s even in Scotland – and thankfully nowhere near Aberdeen…