Three recent, excellent crime novels set in Scotland, have caught the eye of book reviewer ANNA CREER.

Award-winning Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, the creator of Tartan Noir, has received the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writer’s Association.

The award was in recognition of her lifetime achievement as a crime writer, as well as the Theakston’s Old Peculiar award for an outstanding Contribution to Crime Writing. 

McDermid’s novels have also been adapted for TV and radio, most notably the Wire in the Blood series featuring DCI Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and, more recently, Karen Pirie, based on her novels featuring Detective Inspector Karen Pirie of the Scottish Historic Crimes Unit. Silent Bones (Sphere) is the eighth novel in the series. 

It’s midwinter and the rain in Edinburgh is torrential, creating a massive mudslide dislodging a steep bank on the M73, revealing “unmistakably human remains” with “the grim sight of a skull grinning up… out of the mud”. The stretch of motorway was built in the spring of 2014 and, therefore, Karen Pirie and her team are assigned to the case. 

DNA identifies the victim as an investigative journalist Sam Nimmo, who before his disappearance had been the chief suspect in the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. The HCU investigation reveals Nimmo had been chasing evidence of a sexual assault at an expensive fundraiser for the “Yes” campaign in the referendum for Scottish independence. 

At the same time Drew Jamison contacts the HCU about his brother Tom, whose death five years earlier had been declared an accident. Drew is convinced his brother was murdered on the Scotsman Steps, a wide spiral staircase that’s a short cut from the Royal Mile to Waverley Station. He also claims he knows the identity of the murderer. 

Just before his death, Tom had joined an exclusive, influential male book group called The Justified Sinners. The name came from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg (1824), which argues that “if you were one of God’s chosen ones, the elect, you could do what the hell you liked on earth because your place in heaven was guaranteed. Right up to and including murder”. 

The investigations of the two murders eventually merge as Pirie and her team are relentless in their pursuit of the truth. 

Silent Bones is a clever, cold case police procedural. McDermid can be forgiven for focusing more on her intriguing plot than on indepth characterisations. 

MELBOURNE-based writer, editor and actor Laura McCluskey sets her debut novel, The Wolf Tree (HarperCollins) on a remote Scottish Island. Her grandfather was born and raised in Glasgowand she says she has “always felt a particular pull towards Scotland”.

McCluskey’s fictional island of Eilean Eadar is isolated and difficult to reach, with only 200 inhabitants. When 18-year-old Alan Ferguson is found dead at the foot of the island’s lighthouse, it’s declared a suicide, but the mainland police decide to investigate and send two detective inspectors, Georgie Lennox and Richard Stewart to the island. 

They learn that Alan had been “a bright boy robbed of a bright future”. They are told that “he was a happy child, then a happy teenager” and he had applied to a number of universities on the mainland. Why would he commit suicide?

The Wolf Tree is a story of a community resistant to change and resentful of outsiders. Although the Roman Catholic priest, Father Ross, is the main authority on the island, sinister pagan superstitions survive. An air of menace develops during the short, dark winter days in a tense, atmospheric story with gothic undertones. 

Last, and the most Scottish, is Natalie Jayne Clark’s debut novel, The Malt Whiskey Murders (Polygon) about a couple reopening an abandoned whisky distillery near Campbelltown in Kintyre.

Eilidh and her wife Morag know that the whisky left to mature in the 50-year-old barrels in the distillery could be priceless. But there’s a problem. In two of the barrels they discover murdered men perfectly preserved by the alcohol. Morag decides they’ll keep their find a secret because they’ve poured all their resources into reopening the distillery, but Eilidh becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth. 

Although the murder mystery is intriguing, it is almost a secondary detail to an exploration of the joys of whisky, its history and the processes to distill and age a great variety.

Clark herself is an active whisky ambassador and her enthusiasm about the topic is compelling even to this non–whisky drinking reviewer.