Review
Praise for Stuart MacBride:
‘Fierce, unflinching and shot through with the blackest of humour; this is crime fiction of the highest order’
Mark Billingham
‘Some of the grittiest crime-writing in the field’
Independent
‘Admirers of tough, modern crime novels will be in seventh heaven – or should that be hell?’
Express
‘Ferocious and funny, this is Tartan Noir at its best’
Val McDermid
‘Hard-hitting prose with a bone-dry humour and characters you can genuinely believe in, Stuart MacBride’s novels are a real treat’
Simon Kernick
‘Another brilliant, riveting police procedural. I'm green with envy!’ R D Wingfield
This intelligent, exciting police procedural should make the leading writers of the genre start looking over their shoulders’ Sunday Telegraph
‘An impressive debut … an edge-of-your-seat page-turner’ Publishers Weekly
‘A gritty, roller-coaster, in-your-face thriller’ Aberdeen Press and Journal
‘A cracking new writer on the crime scene who hooks you from the first page and never lets you go. The action is ferocious and the pace unrelenting’ Northern Echo
‘Compelling reading’ Telegraph
‘Gripping’ Daily Mirror
Review
Product Description
The Number One bestselling crime thriller from the award-winning Stuart MacBride. A bloody, brilliant and brutal story of murder, kidnap and revenge.
Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret…
Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last.
The tabloids call him ‘The Birthday Boy’. He’s been snatching girls for twelve years, always in the run-up to their thirteenth birthday, sending the families his homemade cards showing their daughters being slowly tortured to death.
But Ash hasn’t told anyone about Rebecca’s birthday cards – they all think she’s just run away from home – because if anyone finds out, he’ll be taken off the investigation. And he’s sacrificed too much to give up before his daughter’s killer gets what he deserves…
About the Author
Stuart MacBride is the author of several bestselling novels featuring DS Logan McRae, and the near-future thriller Halfhead. The McRae books have won him the CWA’s Dagger in the Library, the Barry Award for Best Debut Novel, and Best Breakthrough Author at the ITV3 crime thriller awards.
Stuart lives in the north-east of Scotland with his Fiona, cat Grendel, about a million spiders (as yet unnamed), and a vegetable plot full of weeds (called Frank).
