Operation Maypole has stalled. It is seventeen months since the serial killer ‘The Bloodsmith’ first struck and the police are getting nowhere. The press is brewing up a media storm and the ‘High Heidyins’ at police HQ desperately want a result. It’s the sort of case that can make a career, but more likely it seems, sink one without trace. The case is passed to DCI Ross to handle, and he foists it on to DI Tudor. Tudor is relying on his team to get the required result and DS Lucy McVeigh and DC Duncan (Dunk) Fraser keep getting the short straw.

Lucy has problems of her own and when the recently released killer Benedict Strachan appears begging for her help they multiply rapidly. When Benedict was eleven, he and an accomplice stabbed to death a homeless man in a dark side street one night. Benedict was caught and convicted but never revealed the identity of the other child with him and now released from prison is convinced ‘they’ are out to get him.

Back to fictional Oldcastle but this time not an Ash Henderson novel. Here we have new characters in the form of DS Lucy McVeigh and DC Duncan (Dunk) Fraser to keep us entertained and they certainly do that!
It treads familiar ground for regular MacBride novels in that the main character is a troubled cop (think Logan Macrae) who is saddled with a slightly barnpot side kick (think Tufty or Alice). Lucy’s problems stem from a girl’s night out and an apparent White Knight being nothing of the sort. The ordeal of Lucy and her friend are particularly harrowing, with no punches being pulled by the author. Strong stuff indeed but not gratuitous. This seems to explain Lucy’s erratic behaviour and motivations but of course there is always a little something extra added to the mix. The ‘Dunk’ provides plenty of light relief him being unfit and a short arse with a propensity to dress like a 1960s beat poet.

As with most of his work it is the author’s ability in mixing dark and light is what impresses. He can convincingly describe the grotty side of life in Scotland’s housing schemes and some the lowlife that add to this misery. The murders are gory and gruesome and sometimes quite inventive. These are always unflinchingly described making the novels not for the highly sensitive.

Then just when everything seems to be bleak and desolate, he resorts to humour which unerringly hits the spot. As usual there is plenty of dark, gallows type humour but also moments of the daft, strange, or surreal.
The dialogue is the usual mixture of snappy one-liners mixed with his trademark stream of consciousness ramblings in the background.

As you are reading its progresses as you might expect a typical Stuart MacBride book to, perhaps a little formulaic for some but packed with just what his readers have come to expect. Then at 75% through it starts to get a little bit strange. At 80% in the author borrows Spinal Tap’s guitarist Nigel Tufnel’s amp and turns it up to eleven ("It's one louder, isn't it?") and it gets totally insane. It would be difficult to explain without a spoiler but certainly everything is suddenly turned on its head. I expect this will divide opinion, but I loved it. It’s not often you can read a book by an established novelist whose work you are familiar with and think I never saw that coming.

A crime novel packed with light and dark, brutality and laugh out loud humour, peaking with a totally unexpected twist.

It's fair to say DS Lucy McVeigh doesn't have a huge amount of confidence in her partner DC Duncan Fraser, commonly called the Dunk! Unfortunately they've just been assigned to the team involved in Operation Maypole, investigating a serial killer known in the Scottish press as the Bloodsmith so they will be working closely on everything. There is very little to go on however, and most of those involved feel they are getting nowhere fast.

Added to this are the problems resulting from the release of 27 year old Benedict Strachan who was jailed sixteen years earlier for murder. Scarred by his experiences he is convinced 'they' are just waiting for an opportunity to 'get him'. As Lucy used his case as part of her dissertation, 'Children Who Kill' he is now convinced only she can help him remain alive.

I have read and enjoyed this author's work before and am sure I will again but this was a disappointing and strange experience. It was a little confusing at the start but seemed to find its feet encouraging me to feel hopeful for the remainder of the story. Instead everything got seriously weird and, to me at least, more than a little unrealistic. Although I didn't feel the PTSD was clearly signposted it did gradually became apparent, unfortunately it wasn't enough to even begin to explain the sudden changes which became the main focus of the story.

I was able to read an advanced copy of this book thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the opinions expressed are my own. Unfortunately I didn't enjoy this and can't recommend it in any way.

Whilst all of this book is good, the last 20% truly had my mouth hanging open and me thinking omg!!! Such huge twists and turns that I truly didn’t see coming. A truly brilliant crime thriller!

I can’t decide which descriptive words best describe this book but hopefully you’ll get my point…Dark, clever, witty. Brutal, smart, entertaining. Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant! I am a fan of Stuart MacBride but this has to be one of my favourite. It starts as an excellent police procedural and then with an unexpected twist it turns into a brilliant psychological thriller.

This is a difficult review to write as normally i love Stuarts books, particularly the Logan Rae series.
I struggled with this book, I think because I couldn't really get involved with the characters, we know Lucy is struggling with PTSD following a very distressing attack on her and a friend. Her symptoms are not helped by the fact she's being stalked everywhere she goes. Her colleague "Dunk" doesn't really seem to help much or have any police knowledge sbd just quotes random facts about the hierarchy and influential people.
They are assigned to a case that previous departments have failed to solve. The book starts to get interesting at around 50% but then veres off into the ridiculous at 80% leaving me totally blindsided and bewildered as to what I've read.

This is a stand-alone novel from Stuart MacBride. I have read all his Logan McRae books which I thoroughly enjoyed. I therefore thought I knew what to expect from this new book, a bit of humour, and a fast paced book. I don’t want to give any spoilers except to sat the first 80% was really good, kept you interested the last 20% I just couldn’t understand.
A serial killer called The Bloodsmith has evaded capture for the past seventeen months, DS Lucy McVeigh, her Sergeant D. Duncan Fraser, the Dunk and her team are given the unenviable task of finding out who the killer is. McVeigh appears to be suffering from PTSD, she is also trying to track down Benadict Strachan recently released from prison for killing a homeless man when he was a child, and who has disappeared, after being beaten up, saying someone is stalking him., The story revolves round McVeigh and The Dunk revisiting the murder sites of The Bloodsmith’s victims and following the clues until they know who The Bloodsmith is. As I stated the first 80% of the book is fast paced full of dark humour and kept me guessing. The book is more than just a crime book, MacBride paints his characters so well., you can visualise them, the character development is good as is the story until the last part when it veers off into the absurd. My thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my opinion.

If you want gruesome, bloody, chilling murders laced with humour then Stuart Macbride books are a MUST!

It's a long, twisty read featuring DS Mc Veigh and DC Fraser. on the hunt for a killer. I am not going to spoil it further., but I loved it

Thanks to Net Galley and Random House UK for the chance to read and review.

I have not read anything by Stuart MacBride for a while and loved his books a few years ago. It was good to be introduced to a new character. Firstly this is a pretty long book and at times I was not sure where it was going with various stories interweaving.
I think some may give up with the book but perceiver and stick with it. The final few twists are remarkable (though I guessed the main one pretty quickly). This is a great book and I am looking forward to the next in the series as it has so much potential as it is totally different to most crime fiction.

I really struggled with this long and convoluted read featuring DS Mc Veigh and DC Fraser. They are on the hunt for a killer and the whole read is just a bit far fetched and belief is well and truly suspended. Mc Bride throws in suspense, dark, gritty and a bit of humour but overall, it failed to impress me unlike his other books. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

Tough graphic violence is typical of MacBride (and I forget that) and it's not something I love! But the pacing is good, the detectives smart and intriguing and there are hints right from the beginning v that we are in weird territory too with a murderer and a strange agenda. Effective and pacey this is not however my favourite! (I like the verve of the detective, Lucy, although she cis besetcwith many problems at once .. credible?)

Stuart MacBride is an author whose books I really enjoy, but some of them tend to be a little graphic in terms of violence and so, being a reading wimp, I often have quite long gaps between reading him. This novel has a new central character – Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh and trusty sidekick DC Duncan Fraser, ‘the Dunk.’ Mirroring other characters from MacBride, there is a lot of humour, good dialogue and Lucy is the sarcastic, smart one, while the Dunk spouts monologues about the class system and how unfair life is. I am also pleased to report that this is not particularly graphic – certainly not compared to other books I have by MacBride, so it is safe if you do not enjoy too much violence.

This does open with two children killing a homeless man in the past, before taking the reader into the present. A serial killer, nicknamed the Bloodsmith, has been on the loose for seventeen months and McVeigh finds herself involved in the investigation. There is, it has to be fair, a lot of things currently going on in McVeigh’s life. Benedict Strachan, accused of murdering a homeless man when he was only eleven, has recently been released from prison and informs McVeigh someone is after him. Meanwhile, McVeigh has personal issues, having possible PTSD and being forced, against her will, to see a therapist. She also has professional standards on her back, has a stalker and is aware that the Bloodsmith will be difficult to catch after so long.

Well, this is a difficult crime novel to review without giving away plot spoilers. For the first two thirds of this book, I was in 5-star territory and then, for a while, it felt like I was on a roller-coaster and the plot went a little haywire. Eventually, by the end, I was invested again, but, well, this is not a run of the mill crime book. If you can keep an open mind and just go with it, then you should have an enjoyable ride and – I guess the real question is would I read another book featuring Lucy McVeigh? Yes, but I hope the Dunk would be plodding and puffing along behind her. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

This started out as a good Police Procedural Thriller but what a long read !! The characters were good and realistic ,the murders horrific but suddenly after reading 75% of the book the story changed direction completely which bordered on the realms of fantasy and for me this spoilt the book as it seemed surreal ,I wasn't sure if it might all be a dream but sadly it wasn't it was real .Thanks to NetGalley for my ARC .

I'm generally a massive fan of this author's books but I couldn't get along with this one so well, there is a plot twist which takes you to a very different place which I struggled with, perhaps I couldn't really understand what the author was trying to do, it was still a good book but I found it hard to understand what was going on

We make a welcome return to Oldcastle with No Less The Devil, the latest deliciously dark offering from Stuart MacBride, but whilst the territory may be familiar, this is a whole new cast of characters with Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh front and centre. She is the most intriguing of characters, for reasons that will become apparent during the reading, someone who manages to both fit the archetypal Detective you would expect from this kind of noirish novel and yet absolutely not. She is a troubled soul, a woman with a history that takes some time to be spelled out to readers, but which has more than a slight bearing on what comes to pass in her hunt for the serial killer known as 'Bloodsmith'.

For me this story sits somewhere between the darkness which typified the early Logan McRae novels, and certainly our first outing with Ash Henderson on the streets of Oldcastle, and the more madcap-esque novels of late, the likes of A Dark So Deadly, with Mother and the misfit mob, or those where Roberta Steel's inimitable brand of humour comes to the fore. There is that vein of humour, largely coming in the interactions of the police team especially Lucy and her partner, The Dunk, but there are also some very sombre and skin crawling moments, those bouts of tension and threat that you might expect from a Stuart MacBride novel.

There is nothing overly graphic in terms of our being present during the dark deeds of murder, but there is no doubt left in our minds about what fate the victims suffered. With the exception of the first dispatch in the book, we come to them many months after the fact so are able to stay one step removed from the depravity. There is one scene, recounted by Lucy looking back, which is quite visceral and emotionally charged and which goes a long way to explaining why she reacts as she does, but whilst it is hard to read, it is not overly graphic, or simply there as a shocking plot device. But it's definitely impactful.

I really enjoyed getting to know Lucy over the course of the book, even if her approach to policing is a little ... unconventional at times. There is a lot of conflict in her life, and she finds herself the subject of some unwanted attention, of the threatening, the professional and, dare we suggest it, the romantic kind. The relationship between her and The Dunk is fun, if not quite fresh, a kind of tamer version of McRae and Steel with the gender roles reversed. Then there is the constant presence of Professional Standards officer, Charlie, there only for her own protection of course, but who acts as her morale and professional conscience, even if she ignore him more than Pinocchio did Jiminy Cricket. There's a real determination to her, but also an inherent sadness which takes a time to get to the root of, but she was fascinating and I'd be interested to see how her character would be explored should there be more books set in her corner of Oldcastle's police station.

The Bloodsmith is an almost mythical character and there are scenes throughout the book which serve to muddy our understanding of just who they might be. Certainly there are endless contradictions which means the real Bloodsmith is kept hidden until just the right moment in the book. It makes for a very surprising reveal and while I'd guessed part of the reveal, I'd by no means guessed it all. The pacing in the book is just right for what is a considerable read - over 450 pages - but there was nothing that I felt didn't fit. Maybe I'd have liked just a slightly more serious edge to the story itself, I really enjoyed some of those earlier, darker reads, but there was enough focus on the investigation and the various invisible threads that linked the victims to keep my focus right to the end. And ending, I should add, that does leave a smile on the face and a very interesting set of possibilities for the future.

Stuart MacBride goes weird.

OK, he's done weird before with Halfhead - a sci-fi manuscript he had written before he became famous, but this one is a police procedural that, like Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman, goes very weird indeed. And I'm not sure I liked it.

DS Lucy McVeigh is an ambitious young detective, based in Oldcastle (which in an amusing break in the fourth wall is described as the murder capital of Scotland) and assigned to re-heat the cold trail of The Bloodsmith, a serial killer who likes to drain the blood of his victims. If DS McVeigh is to use the opportunity to make the step up to DI, she needs to keep one step ahead of the office politics as well as solving the mystery.

At first we imagine that DS McVeigh is a brilliant but maverick officer, but as we progress it seems she is quite willing to bypass procedure altogether. She is a deeply flawed heroine. This perhaps explains the presence in her life of the Professional Standards investigator - who may be picking up the pieces from a past incident but seems to have more than a passing interest in the current investigation. And then there is the curious stalker that DS McVeigh keeps spotting on the periphery of her vision.

There is a plot twist that comes at the three-quarter point but even the most obtuse reader will have spotted that things were not quite right well before it is revealed. This surreal direction makes us reassess what we have seen before, but I am not convinced there is a genuine and consistent connection between the people before the twist and after it. Maybe that is part of the weirdness. The overall effect, though, is that a novel that does not quite manage to sustain the suspension of disbelief. In all honesty, there are times it drags a bit.

Stuart MacBride is a great crime writer whose work is generally gory, humorous and interesting. This one has the gore, but it is not MacBride's best work.

We're in Oldcastle and Malcolm is in trouble. He's in an abandoned house and he's being threatened by two young people. One is Alegra (we'll soon learn that she's Allegra Dean-Edwards) and Hugo. It seems that Allegra bought Malcolm a new coat to keep him warm (she often does this for homeless people, apparently) but she'd put a tracking device in it so that she and Hugo could find out where he was sleeping. It won't be long before the police realise that Malcolm was one of their own: not many other people are going to have the Oldcastle police crest tattooed on their backs.

Meanwhile, back at the station, Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh has returned to work after some traumatic events. Everyone is treating her with kid gloves and carefully not mentioning Neil Black. That's as well because Lucy can't actually say his name either. It's a problem that isn't going to go away: Black's mother is determined to prove that Lucy murdered her son - it's probably easier than admitting that you gave birth to, and brought up, a monster. No one has suggested that Lucy didn't kill Black - she didn't have a choice - but it leaves you in no doubt that she is capable of extreme violence.

Operation Maypole - the search for the so-called 'Bloodsmith' serial killed has been on the go for seventeen months and it's obvious that overall responsibility is being passed down the ranks so that those higher up are better able to cover their backs. It began with Superintendent Spence, dropped to DCI Ross and now it's with DI Tudor - but expect cameo appearances from senior officers at the first sign of any success. It was ever thus. Lucy McVeigh is partnered with DC Duncan 'the Dunk' Fraser. He has the capacity to be intensely annoying but, on the other hand, he is having to ride around in a pink Bedford Rascal van covered with logos of copulating sausages. No - sorry - you'll have to read the book to understand how that one came about. I'm not even going to attempt an explanation.

It's a big book but a remarkably quick read - simply because the tension ratchets up and you have got to find out what happens next. Lucy McVeigh is a great creation: there's an obvious vulnerability there but underlying what looks like PTSD is the knowledge of exactly what she is capable of doing when push comes to shove. The contrast with her partner 'the Dunk' is neat and well done. So far as the plot goes, you will need to be in the wide-awake club towards the end of the book: Stuart MacBride cleverly trusts his readers to work out for themselves exactly what is going on but if you make the effort the results are worthwhile.

If you'd like to read more from Stuart MacBride, we can recommend his Logan McRae series.

I would like to thank both Netgalley and the publisher, for supplying a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Now don’t ask me why, but I have to admit that I had not got round to reading any Stuart Macbride books, prior to this one. Not sure why, always intended to and have a few on my shelves.

I was hooked from the start with a great plot and some fantastic characters with amusing banter. It was a fantastic gripping thriller, that I was thoroughly enjoying until around 75-80%. But then it just eemed to go off on a tangent, that made me think had I picked up another book. Kept thinking it was going to turn out as a dream sequence.

I will definitely read more of this author, although I hope they don’t all change direction like this did, it was an easy 4.5 -5 stars, but I have to drop my score to 3 stars

I love this authors books you are always guaranteed chaos, plenty of darkness and liberally sprinkled with humour. I found this book uneven and disjointed and it took a while to get into. The ending was bizarre and darn right weird. Still a good read but not as good as some of his other books.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in return for giving an honest review.

Unfortunately, I struggled with this book best bit was very near the end but before that just did not hold my attention I have always loved Stuart MacBride's books but this one has certainly has let him down. I did receive a copy to read and review normally it would only take me a couple of days to read but this one I just never had the heart to keep picking it up to shame as I'm sure it took time and effort to write.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House UK for a copy to read and review I'm sorry it was not a pleasant read like most of MacBride's work as I don't like to give negative results.

Thank you very much to netgalley for this advanced copy of mcbrides latest book.

I initially had some issues accessing the content. This took a couple of weeks for the publisher to sort out. We got there eventually!

I am disappointed to say that I didn't rate this book very highly. It was very long like all of stuarts books but the story wasn't engaging, the characters were drab and tedious and the denouement when it finally arrived was unbelievable and silly frankly.

I unfortunately cannot recommend this title.