Books like Where the Bodies Are Buried

There's something about the far northern latitudes -- the weather, perhaps? -- that seems to bring out the noir in the writers who live there. The whole Scandinoir industry is a case in point; would Harry Hole be such a wreck if he lived on the Costa del Sol? So, too, it goes with Tartan Noir. My main exposure to crime north of the Tweed has been through Ian Rankin, so belatedly taking up Christopher Brookmyre's 2011 Where the Bodies Are Buried was a happy accident. Happy, indeed.Two parallel investigations make up the body of the novel: a police enquiry into the brutal murder of a two-bit Glasgow pusher, and the private hunt for a missing P.I. The former is led by DS Catherine McLeod, a middle-aged detective who's hit the glass ceiling inside the Glasgow police and is buffeted by the political wrangling inside the department and the personal politics within her family. The second case features twenty-something Jasmine Sharp, a former- or failed-everything almost dysfunctional enough to feature in a Swedish crime novel, who had been attempting without signal success to learn her uncle's detective trade when he suddenly disappeared. That the two cases tangle and lead to unexpected places is not, itself, unexpected.So far, so standard. What elevates Bodies above the norm is voice and characterization.Brookmyre's voice takes on the personalities of the point-of-view characters, flowing smoothly from type to type as he shifts from McLeod to Sharp to various hardcases. He seems to have absorbed the bleak, bitter worldview of the police, the braggadocio of the hoods, and Jasmine's utter disarray. He can be tart, smartarsed and darkly funny, or confused, vulnerable and desolate, depending on who owns the stage in each shortish chapter. While the former seems to be his natural (or more comfortable) voice, he manages to pull off Jasmine's inner life without sounding like a bloke trying to impersonate a hen.His two main characters are women who are not only completely different from each other, but also avoid being either sex toys or guys in bras.McLeod is persuasively settled in midlife, suffering both the physical and mental distresses that come when you realize you have more time behind you than in front of you. Her interactions with her younger husband and her two young sons feel authentically fraught with the everyday tensions and frustrations of life. At work, she deals with political weasels, the various slights that come from being a woman in a man's clubhouse, and of course the new- and old-school villains who fill her daily to-do list. Her dealings with them and her reactions to them also feel organic and well-observed. I've known American versions of McLeod and could easily recognize her.Jasmine starts as a hot mess, a former-almost-actress who is useless at the detective arts, chronically mourning her now-departed mother, barely able to scrape up the two coins to rub together. Everything perplexes or threatens her. Yet unlike some of her Scandinavian kin, she learns, she grows, and she finds herself in work she never expected to do, far less succeed in. Her small successes and flashes of insight steadily build her into the woman she becomes by the end.The dialog is sharp, fitted to the characters who utter it, and reasonably realistic for the setting. Brookmyre is a Scot and his characters are Scots. Theirs is not Oxbridge English. Both the dialog and the narrative go far past the occasional "wee" and "aye" Rankin would salt in to keep a Caledonian atmosphere. Just go with it; you can nearly always figure out the meaning through the context or by sounding out the dialect.I'd give this four and a half stars if we could give half-stars; sadly, we can't. The main demerits are for a too-tidy ending to the tangled mess that preceded it and an underdeveloped central male character who feels more a type than a person (especially in comparison with the lasses). Still, it's a fine tale told well. If you like your skies gray and your morals grayer, give Bodies a try. Brookmyre's written a few others over the past seventeen years, so there's more where this came from -- and more's the better.