I finished this book before I left for Minot, but a review of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay didn’t fit my schedule at the time. As a result my memories of details are a little faded. But I’ll give you my general reactions, which remain vivid.

G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that there are two meanings of the word “good.” If a man could shoot his grandmother with a rifle at 500 yards, he would call him a good shot, but he wouldn’t necessarily call him a good man.

In the same way, The Unburied Dead is an excellent book in terms of technical achievement. It provides a grim and gritty picture of police life in Glasgow, where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton gets involved in a hunt for a serial killer. Thomas is a relatively honest cop, in an indifferently honest department where the police aren’t above “stitching up” a suspect if they know he’s guilty. But some cops have gone over that fuzzy line, and it only serves to muddy the investigational waters. Thomas himself is contemplating a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, the mother of his daughters, but he can’t resist a dalliance with his sexy boss.

In short, this book is extremely short on sympathetic characters. The violence is horrifying, the language filthy. The Unburied Dead was a masterful piece of contemporary noir, which I was delighted to be done with when I finished it.