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Flesh House (Logan McRae)

Author: Stuart Macbride
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Category: Book

This item is no longer available

Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

29 reviews
Sales Rank: 3199654

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480

ISBN: 0312382634
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780312382636
ASIN: 0312382634

Publication Date: October 14, 2008 (In 53 Days)

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Flesh House
•	Paperback - Flesh House

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
Those who like their crime thrillers diamond hard (but shot through with macabre humour) need look no further than Stuart MacBride. As Flesh House, his latest, once again proves, he has few equals in this area, and is more than worthy of the ever-growing legion of admirers he is gleaning. His tough protagonist, Logan McRae, is once again negotiating the mean streets of Aberdeen, with violence and threat forever at his elbow. Those who have read Cold Granite, Dying Light and Broken Skin will know what to expect here -- and they'll be aware that they're not in for a comfortable ride.

The city is in a state of fear. Some 20 years ago, the Grampian police nailed a particularly vicious serial killer known as The Flesher, a monster who had claimed victims throughout the country. But one of those frequent legal appeals which so often release dangerous criminals into the community has freed him, and when a container with human body parts appears at Aberdeen harbour, it looks like the stage is once again set for carnage on a massive scale. DS Logan McRae (along with his less experienced colleague, Chief Constable Mark Faulds from Birmingham -- who was on the original team tracking down The Flesher), finds himself in charge of one of the most ambitious manhunts city has ever seen. And then members of the original team tracking down their serial killer prey (whose real name is Ken Wiseman) begin to disappear -- and more human meat is making grisly appearances. All of this is delivered with the requisite grasp of tension and characterisation that we have come to expect from Stuart MacBride. There are those who will feel he has gone too far in Flesh House in confronting the less savoury aspects of human behaviour, but fans of uncompromising crime writing will be in their element. --Barry Forshaw

Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

Readable but little more August 9, 2008
I've read all MacBride's novels but sadly they don't get any better. I can only agree with another reviewer that as a writer, MacBride can't take anything seriously. Because of this, I found some of the quite nasty things in this book, and the so-called gory bits actually quite funny.[e.g. black pudding....has it put me off the stuff? No way!!] My point is that this shouldn't happen in a crime novel. You really should be horrified or feel that the police are getting somewhere in catching nasty villains. What you get here is a Punch + Judy show. Mark Billingham has been a stand-up comedian but knows how far to take humour, when to stop. As a result, he is a very fine crime writer. Equally, I don't think too many people laugh at Stephen King's novels. I think Stuart MacBride is currently caught between a number of stools and needs to take stock.

3 out of 5 stars

Loved it/hated it but couldn't stop reading it August 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

First Sentence: `No, you listen to me: if my six year old son isn't back here in ten minutes I'm going to come round there and rip you a new arsehole, are we clear?'

Twenty years ago, there was a serial killer knows as "The Flesher" who was purported to kill people and eat them.

Now, seven years after the killer has been released from prison, human meat has been found in a local butcher shop and DS Logan McRae are trying to track down a serial killer dressed in a butcher's apron wearing a Margaret Thatcher mask.

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. Be aware that murders are very graphic and gruesome, but I can deal with that.

My issue is the characters. McRae is about the only remotely likeable character and, even for him, you have very little background or real sense of who he is. The characters are realistic but largely unpleasant.

On the other hand, the plot, while unrelentingly grim, is thoroughly engrossing and delightfully twisty. There was less humor in this book than in ones in the past. A bit more light to offset the dark would have helped.

McBride is definitely a good, skilled writer. I can't say I enjoyed the book, because of the theme, but I couldn't stop reading it.

1 out of 5 stars

Very disappointing August 6, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I'm as baffled by all those good reviews as I am by the low quality of this book. I've read the other three in the series and couldn't wait to lay my hand on number four - what a mistake.

I won't complain about the bad prose, I knew MacBride is no Shakespeare and I didn't expect him to stun me with graceful words.

But - I did expect to be entertained, I did expect to bite my nails and read all night, I did expect to care about the characters, none of which happened due to an overkill of, well, killing. After a while I had to go back and forth to remind myself who the victims were and why I should care.

Every chapter is a carbon copy of the one before, introduction of victims, chop chop, a red herring here and there (as obvious as daylight and very insulting to the reader's intelligence), enter the cops etc etc and the solution is ridiculous.

Mac Bride tried too hard to shock me and it didn't work!

1 out of 5 stars

a terrible effort July 23, 2008
3 out of 9 found this review helpful

I listened to the audio version of this novel, and was extremely disappointed. I've lived in Aberdeenshire all my life and I've never heard anyone talking the way they do in this audio novel. So to the publishers: Either get someone with an Aberdeen accent to read the next novel, or don't bother trying, & just go with "BBC" English all the way. What you've done with this one is inauthentic, offputting and yes, insulting.

I listened ti the CDs, n it ended up gan oot the car windie. I've bed up here a ma life n ah've niver heard onybody speakin like at, they ether need ti git an Aberdonian on board for i next ane, or dinna bather wi accents at a. Fit thiv diene wie this book is nithing short o a disgrace.

2 out of 5 stars

Carry On Up the Truncheon July 15, 2008
10 out of 19 found this review helpful

What annoys me most about Flesh House isn't so much what's inside its pages, but what's written on the front and back covers. Let's start with Mark Billingham (a personal friend of the author if memory serves), who declares : "Fierce, unflinching crime fiction of the highest order". Sorry, but none of that is true, frankly. A more accurate appraisal might have been "Feeble, uninteresting crime fiction of the lowest order." On the back Val Mcdermid calls it "Ferocious and funny" - well, some of the imagery is pretty grim and unpleasant but the relentless attempts at comedy - and I'm talking about on almost every single page and which rarely raise a smile anyway - totally undermine any dark atmosphere the author was trying to create. Reginald Hill opines "If you're looking for taut narrative, gut-churning incident, strong characterisation, all shot through with savagely dark humour, then look no further." Well, Hill's observations are pure fiction in themselves, unless he had said "look elsewhere" for such objectives.

Let me explain why I say these things. The narrative is not taut, it is amongst the worst I have seen, and one of the reasons for this is MacBrides's continued obsession with mixing the narrative style with the dialogue style such that all the expletives spoken by the characters appear just as frequently in the narrative. That's amateurish, annoying and arduous for those of us like myself who have put up with this 'method' for four consecutive novels. I shouldn't really even mention the word 'prose' here, because there simply isn't any. It's just words. Nothing poetic, nothing beautiful and nothing to admire. Just as grudging a complaint on my part is the mention of 'strong characterisation', which as a description is funnier than any of MacBride's attempts at comedy after four whole novels.

We have, for want of a better word, a central character in the form of DS Logan McRae; really all he represents is the story's moral conscience, the one without personality or comedic parody and consequently the most uninteresting person in the tale. Flesh House reads like a debut novel, but then so did all of its predecessors - there is categorically NO character development at all, as everybody looks, sounds and smells exactly the same as they always did. While it's true a few dramatic events fall the way of DI Insch, I am utterly sick and tired of the references to his physical size; if this book represented his introduction to the series it would have been bad enough (the words big', 'huge' and 'fat' must collectively appear well over one hundred times) but for the many who already knew of his dimensions, it's very wearisome.

Savagely dark humour? Try this extract and see if you agree:-
"She wasn't kidding about Insch's mood - by the time Logan bumped into the inspector, he looked as if someone had stuffed a hand grenade up his bum and pulled the pin. The explosion was imminent. Fire in the hole."
Er - this is not savage, nor is it dark, and come to think of it, it's not funny either. I get the impression that MacBride likes humour best of all, and is trying (very successfully, it must be said) to sell a comedy story in the crime fiction genre. The only line in the whole book that raised a smile for me - because it was subtle, for once - was on P.401 of the hardback when Logan is having a conversation over a cup of tea with the pathologist Doc Fraser. Immediately after Doc Fraser gruesomely describes the means of death (which involved decapitation), Logan calmly replies, "Here you go. Milk, two sugars." A very rare example of what might be regarded as clever humour, but all of the rest throughout the tale is straight from the stage of a corny pantomime or a Carry-On film. The 'horrors' are plentiful but these are totally undermined by MacBride's insistence on trying to be funny, and vice versa.

The only saving grace is that Flesh House is a little better than the one before - Broken Skin - which was a complete shambles. The irony is that I have a feeling that MacBride could do much better than this if he wanted to, but has cleverly assessed the demand from the biggest audience in order to maximise sales. That's writing for money rather than out of passion, but also a sad reflection of the demands and standards of the contemporary British crime-fiction reader who if only they knew, could find much fiercer and more unflinching crime fiction elsewhere (try the first two of Mo Hayder's Jack Caffery series for example), funnier and better-used humour from John Connolly, immeasurably finer prose from R J Ellory and stronger characterisation from Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin or Val McDermid among many others. Flesh House is popcorn crime fiction for the text-message loving populace and little more. There is so much better quality to be found outside of and beyond these pages.