Book Review:Dead Men’s Bones by James Oswald : It’s time to shake off the shackles of traditional Police Procedurals and try Oswald’s supernatural meets Scottish policing.

I guarantee you’ll love this book and I’ll explain why.

A few years ago in conversation with Stuart MacBride I mentioned that I wasn’t sure about the wave of crime novels in other dimensions, or mixed with stuff - I preferred my serial killers  to be ‘normal’

To which Stuart replied (and I paraphrase) 

“Oh so you’re alright with blood and gore and torture but add in a lobotomy or a bump in the night and you switch off?”

Put like that I realised I was being narrow minded and made up my mind to try ‘new’ things .  I've now read all of James Oswald’s supernatural crime books and he’s won me over with intriguing story-lines, brilliant characters and the seamless way he merges the procedural stuff with the supernatural.

In Dead Men’s Bones Oswald’s very normal (with a reluctant link to the supernatural) DI Tony McLean is faced with the body of a naked man covered from head to toe in newly applied tattoos (OUCH!).  But, when a prominent MSP suffocates his twin daughters, shoots his wife and then himself, the tattooed man is shunted to the side-lines.  McLean knows there’s something dodgy going on because he’s the last person anyone expects to be given a prominent case and he’s soon proved right when coincidence seems to link the Tattooed man and the MSP.

McLean has only a few officers willing to work with him because of the ‘strange’ things that happen around him so I was tickled pink when his DS says to him in all seriousness ‘It’s gone all weird again hasn’t it?’  

That I think sums up Oswald’s books- things happen and then weirder things happen but somehow that’s fine because the case is always solved at the end.

There are so many little gems in these books that I always find something that makes me go aaaw! – Not giving anything away, I’ll just say in Dead Man’s Bones it was the cats (plural) and the sacrilegious theft nearly committed by McLean.

Go on...


       ... you know you want to ...


... buy the whole series and lock yourself away till you've read them all...

                                                              
 ... you won’t regret it