As the cover suggests, Jack Reacher meets Line of Duty! Max Craigie works in an anti-corruption unit in Edinburgh and his wife, an immigration lawyer has an Albanian teenage client, trafficked to the UK, who goes missing suddenly. It soon becomes clear there is an overlap with Albanian Organised Crime being targeted and that there are serious high-level police leaks. Entertaining dialogue. ( )

This is outing number 4 for DI Max Craigie and his trusted colleague DC Janie Calder as they search out corruption in Police Scotland. On this occasion they are involved in the hunt for an abducted Albanian girl, Affi Smith, who was rescued from trafficking a few years before and has been living with a couple in the highlands of Scotland. As they search they quickly find evidence of information being passed over to the traffickers by police.

This book keeps up the very high standard of the earlier books in the series and it is always great to spend time with Max and Janie, as well as the rest of the team. Neil Lancaster has pulled together a great group of characters; I always feel like the highlands of Scotland is another character in these books, and for me adds another layer to the book, which makes me love them.

There is plenty of fast paced action in this book, as with the others in the series, and the deeper the team dig the more corruption they find. Well before the end of the book I worked out who the main culprit wasn’t but this still didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Overall the series has developed into a must read series for me and a favourite series. If you like high quality crime fiction I would definitely recommend the book which can be read as a standalone, but I also recommend the series. A five star read for me and I look forward to the next outing for Max and his team.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. ( )

As this is the fourth book in the DS Max Craigie series and I hadn’t read any of the earlier ones, I did wonder whether I might find it difficult to fully-appreciate (and enjoy!) this one as a stand-alone story. However, I needn’t have worried as there were enough clues given to fill in some of the shared history of the investigating team and I very quickly became absorbed in this fast-moving, tension-filled story. In part this was because it soon became clear that the author had very effectively used his police background (military police, working as a detective with London’s Metropolitan Police and his experiences as a covert policing specialist) to ensure an authentic ring of truth about all aspects of the developing plot, police procedures, the complications which can occur when different professional agencies are involved in a case. The portrayal of the team’s increasingly complex investigation into the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Affi, who as a twelve-year-old had been trafficked by an Albanian gang and used as a drugs mule before being rescued and given a supposedly safe new identity with a loving foster family, offered a chilling insight into the lengths criminal gangs are prepared to go to in order to protect their ‘assets’ and to terrorise their vulnerable victims into compliance and silence by threatening to harm those they love most.
The inclusion of some very dark, but sadly all too familiar, themes in the story (people trafficking, using children as drug-mules, forced prostitution of under-age girls, gratuitous violence and torture inflicted by vicious sadists, corruption in the police force etc) made this at times a very disturbing story to read, occasionally to the point where I found the escalating tension almost unbearable. However, one of the things I enjoyed most about the author’s storytelling was his timely introduction of some lighter, humorous moments just in time to rescue me from the inherent darkness of the storyline. These came mainly though the interactions of the various members of DS Max Craigie’s team, a diverse group of characters who had clearly found a way to balance out individual foibles and to work together effectively in their quest for justice. Another balancing factor came through the portrayal of Affi’s loving and supportive foster parents and the role they played in offering a secure home to a vulnerable child and showing her that she could leave the past behind and have a better future.
I enjoyed the inclusion of police procedural elements, the important role of forensics in solving crimes, the complex world of cyber-crime and the equally complex use of technological advances to tackle this scourge. All these elements contributed an important dimension to this enjoyable and engaging thriller … as did the author’s inclusion of some highly-evocative Scottish vernacular! ( )