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Ash Henderson is arrogant, rude, violent and treats everyone as less intelligent than himself. The only person he appears to have some tenderness for is McDonald, a functioning alcoholic who can't work unless she's had a large helping of alcohol. I thoroughly enjoyed The Coffinmaker’s Garden which is a gripping read with the added bonus of a lot of dark humour. I couldn’t put it down and was disappointed when it finished, although, as ever, with a laugh. MacBride has an unusual style of presenting telephone conversations partly in italics and of portraying emotion in capitals, usually interspersed with a good sprinkling of swear word, which is unsettling to the eye. The Coffin Maker's Garden is deliciously creepy and oh so twisty. A tale that starts out on a dark and stormy night and just keeps getting better and better. My interest never flagged for a second. Overall, this is tartan noir at its best. It’s exciting, suspenseful with an excellent plot and a well written, humorous storyline. However, if there’s to be another in the series the characters need to rethink their food choices if they are to survive without a coronary before the finale!
A village is collapsing into the North Sea and as another massive storm hits the coast one house reveals too many secrets as buried human remains are suddenly exposed. On this occasion we join Ash Henderson again as he attempts to catch a serial killer who has gone undetected in his actions for decades and Ash is going to stop at nothing to catch them. It requires quite a large suspension of belief to accept this pair as capable of solving not one, but two, major crimes simultaneously without much help from the police. MacBride very rarely introduces a likeable character and, when he does, they are always secondary to Henderson who rides roughshod over everyone in his path. A female police officer appears for a large section of the book but doesn't do much more than drive Henderson about and get leered at, by quite a few characters, because she has attractive boobs. She disappeared after a while and was never referred to again. Ex Detective Inspector Ash Henderson, now part of the Lateral Investigative and Review Unit (LIRU) is called in as a consultant to help detectives with this particular case, due to his previous expertise investigating serial killers, and despite the fact that Ash is no longer a serving police officer, it doesn’t obstruct him in any way, and he’s definitely not someone to cross in his investigations! Just like the Incredible Hulk, you don’t want to make him angry - you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry!
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I’m always intrigued with UK settings and the Scottish locale here was no exception. Before the finale, I learned about butty sausages, chippies, mince and tatties, brollys, brookit, and lorries. Colloquialism abounds-and I was enthralled! But there was always the writing (well, that's not true, the writing only started two chapters above this one). I fell victim to that most dreadful of things: peer pressure. Two friends were writing novels and I thought, 'why not? I could do that'. Ash is a Superhero - able to continue despite all the beatings, injuries, amputations, torture, stabbings and shootings he receives along the way. But he's the nasty evil Superhero with a psychopathic love of inflicting pain and torturing anyone he assumes to have done wrong. This to me was the ultimate hypocrisy as he himself doesn't seem to even know the rules, let alone follow them. But, in the meantime, I had to get on with the day job and produce a proper full-length police thriller. One that didn’t include haunted funfairs, mummies, or anatomically impossible taxidermy. And still the question remained: what the hell was I going to do about the pandemic?
Fiona’s opinion on this one was, we’re all living through it, no one wants to read about it. What we need is something to lift us out of our current predicament. Something fun. Something that would make people laugh. As much as I love the Logan Macrae series, I have really struggled to like Ash Henderson. The previous stories were good but the character never sat well. It's all changed in this book. Maybe it's because the murdered daughter storyline is resolved (as much as losing a child can be resolved, it is still prevalent in this book) and we've moved on a few years and it's a wholly new serial killer (two actually, we are spoilt here) with no personal attachments but this book feels like a breath of fresh air after the first two. Ash is likeable and I wanted to know more. Granted he's still a thug and very dodgy and has very little morals but this time his character worked for me. I know MacBride has a legion of fans and I would have liked to join them but, although the plot was good, particularly at the beginning, the execution of it let it down. Once again a great plot. 2 cases ongoing dfor the sort-of dynamic duo Ash and Alice. Both with their own demons to bring along and both of which are constantly reminded of. Home> Fiction from Scotland> The Coffinmaker’s Garden The Coffinmaker’s Garden By (author) Stuart MacBride; Read by TBAThank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. It is set to be published in January 2021. Next up was an elongated spell in Westhill -- a small suburb seven miles west of Aberdeen -- where I embarked upon a mediocre academic career, hindered by a complete inability to spell and an attention span the length of a gnat's doodad.
When a storm hits the Scottish coast, Gordon Smith’s home is begins to fall into the North Sea revealing human remains in his garden. The storm is making difficult if not impossible to get to the bodies for further investigations and threatens to wash away the evidence. The police are unable to ascertain just how many people has already killed and how many more he’ll kill if he can’t be found and stopped. Ex-policeman Ash Henderson and forensic psychologist Dr. Alice McDonald are determined to see this one through. The book begins in the coastal village of Clachmara ,which due to coastal erosion is slowly falling into the North Sea. A massive storm is blowing and a fishing boat is in trouble with the Coastguard helicopter in attendance.. Single parent Margaret Compton is horrified to realise that her young son Alfie is missing, a lad with a fascination for helicopters. Rushing into the storm she finds him watching the rescue attempt on the cliffs next to an abandoned house, Part of the cliff falls into the sea ,just after Margaret has snatched Alfie to safety and a cache of human bones is exposed.. Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex I also didn't like the alternation between third- and first-person narrator. It's confusing and it feels like lazy writing. That was magnificent! I am a huge fan of Stuart MacBride and have read pretty much all of his books. (Former Detective Inspector) Ash Henderson is now working as a civilian consultant for the Lateral Investigative and Review Unit (LIRU) along with forensic psychologist Dr Alice McDonald. They both have plenty of demons. In addition Alice is drinking far too much and Ash is recovering from a bullet wound in his foot.The Coffin Maker's Garden by Stuart MacBride sees the welcome return of Ash Henderson and his motley crew 7 long years since their previous outing in A Song For The Dying. Stuart MacBride’s books are always so good and this is one is no different. This book is clever, gritty and funny. But university and I did not see eye to eye, so off I went to work offshore. Like many all-male environments, working offshore was the intellectual equivalent of Animal House, only without the clever bits. Swearing, smoking, eating, more swearing, pornography, swearing, drinking endless plastic cups of tea... and did I mention the swearing? But it was more money than I'd seen in my life! There's something about being handed a wadge of cash as you clamber off the minibus from the heliport, having spent the last two weeks offshore and the last two hours in an orange, rubber romper suit / body bag, then blowing most of it in the pubs and clubs of Aberdeen. And being young enough to get away without a hangover. No one would ever want to cross this author. Death would be painful and drawn out, the body never recovered. He's so good, he's scary!!! Oldcastle is a fictional town in the northeast of Scotland, home to 'Mother's Misfits', the dumping ground for Police Scotland's disgraced and undesirables. It's also a place where terrible things happen. The novel is mostly told from Ash’s point of view in the first person and as he has a rather dark, cynical take on life it makes the read fun and even laugh out loud funny at times. I am Scottish so it all seems very natural and makes perfect sense to me but I can’t judge if it would be the same for non natives. I wouldn’t say that his judgement is always sound as his decision making seems to involve violence on a regular basis, both given and received, but he can always justify it, perhaps. Old school is probably the best description.
Der Hauptprotagonist Ash Henderson ist ein verbitterter und zynischer Expolizist, der sich selbst und seine kurze Zündschnur nicht im Griff hat und der deshalb ständig mit anderen Menschen aneinander gerät. Sowas muss man mögen - ich auf jeden Fall nicht 😅 First, that title. Rarely does a title alone grab me but I was sold on sight. The book was smiling at me - the barely there sort covering a wealth of mordant humor. I wanted to mine it all. Only, what do you do when society is, quite rightly, really sodding concerned about a virus that’s officially killed four million of us (though estimates say the real total is probably more than twelve million)? As soon as I received my own copy of this title it was most definitely going to be my next read. It had to jump my to-be-read queue. It was once again so good that my 10th generation kindle couldn't cope and crashed severely that I had to have a new one. It was only 3 months old!! For years I’ve been saying that crime writers reflect the fears of society. That’s why 1970s crime fiction is so different to 2000s, or 2010. It holds up a mirror to our collective psyche and asks, ‘What are you afraid of?’
LoveReading Says
Ash Henderson, ex police officer and now a 'consultant' of some kind, and Dr Alice McDonald, a forensic psychologist, are sent to the scene to assist the police and become embroiled in the hunt to find the serial killer. Simultaneously, they are involved, to some degree, in an ongoing investigation into another serial killer who is strangling young boys. I was keen to discover whether the author’s new Ash Henderson novel, THE COFFINMAKER’S GARDEN would match the standard set by his earlier series. I was aware that there were two other Ash Henderson books, written several years ago, that did not match the popularity of the Logan McRae series, so I didn’t bother to read them. “The Coffinmaker’s Garden” seemed to be a new start after the McRae series ended. So – did it work? Well, by and large yes. There are two threads to this story. The first is the investigation into the abduction and murder of young boys from around Oldcastle. This is the case that Ash and Dr Alice McDonald are working on when they get a call to attend a scene of a tragic maritime accident in a small coastal village, where an unexpected discovery has been made. Bones. Lots of them. In a garden which is rapidly disappearing into the North Sea due to coastal erosion. But it is not this alone that forces Ash to work alongside DI Malcolmson, a.k.a. ‘Mother’, and her Misfit Mob, but the altogether more grim findings in the basement of the home that the garden and said bones seem to belong to. The McRae novels 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.
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