Undiscovered Scotland

 

"Loose Threads" by Martin Stewart is a hugely enjoyable ride on what feels like a runaway train. The central character, Robbie Gould, is one of Scottish fiction's more memorable characters, a man so gratuitously offensive to just about everyone he meets that it's no real surprise he has plenty of enemies, nor that he creates more wherever he goes. From a reader's point of view, the crowded and growing list of those seeking to do Robbie harm only adds to the breathless pace of this funny, entertaining and deliciously twisty story.

An especially enjoyable feature of the book is the way its author refuses to confine himself to any of the normal categories his story might have been placed in. Murder mystery? With a body in a suitcase, it's certainly that. But it could also be described as a thriller or an espionage novel: it's even got a slight undertone of rom-com. This is a book that demands to be judged on its own terms, and it's extremely successful as a result.

The publisher's description gives a good sense of the plot: "When Dr David Cairney, a politics lecturer, goes missing on the way home from his retirement party, his wife asks ex-boxer and journalist Robbie Gould for help. Gould wants nothing to do with it. But he needs the money. Meanwhile, the body of another politics lecturer, Professor Stephen Hogg, has been found, his body folded into a suitcase beside the Clydeside Expressway. While poking around the murder victim’s office, Gould encounters pathologist Sarah Badar. She worked on Hogg’s post mortem, only to find her report redacted, and she wants answers too. As the pair delve deeper into the case, they unearth connections between the two academics and a rogues’ gallery of oddballs and grotesques including rival gangsters from Edinburgh and Glasgow, a llama-farm owner in Kirkintilloch and an ex-KGB general with a trepanned skull and a thirst for vengeance. Sarah and Gould find themselves immersed in a world of missing Kremlin diamonds and pre-digital espionage – all coded signals, orange peel and scraps of red thread."