Song of the Dead

September 26, 2016
Det. Insp. Ben Westphall, the glum narrator of this haunting series launch from Lindsay (Lost in Juarez), once traveled the world with Britain’s security services until he nearly died in a plane crash in central Africa. Now he’s holed up in the relative quiet of Scotland’s Dingwall, avoiding air travel. All that changes when he’s sent to Estonia (via ferry and car) to investigate claims that tourist John Baden, who allegedly died 12 years earlier on a trip to the Baltic country with his girlfriend, is actually alive. Baden—whose body was found in a lake on the Russian border—recently walked into a Tartu police station and told a fantastical story about being held captive for over a decade and used for organ harvesting and sex by his captors. When Baden’s story checks out, Westphall questions everything about the original investigation, particularly how DNA could match a corpse and a man who’s very much alive. With this richly atmospheric and unrelentingly dark outing, Lindsay solidifies his place as one of the rising stars of tartan noir.

July 31, 2017
Set in Germany in 1563, this engrossing, if extremely grim, thriller from Irish writer Mackay (The War on Truth) centers on a conflict between church and state. Investigating magistrate Paulus Melchior and his 16-year-old assistant, Willie Lessinger, arrive in the isolated mountain town of Bideburg, where Paulus is to preside over the trial of Peter Stumpf. Stumpf was arrested after a campaign of terror in the region, which left more than 60 people torn to shreds and eaten. Stumpf doesn’t deny his responsibility for those savageries, but disputes that he’s a werewolf, despite reports from the soldiers who apprehended him that they saw a wolf killing a child and transforming into a human. The question of Stumpf’s true nature is more than academic, since a human killer would fall under the jurisdiction of the secular courts, but a supernatural one under the church’s authority. The graphic descriptions of Stump’s cannibalistic murders are matched by ones of acceptable cruelties of the time, adding up to a powerful, but depressing, portrayal of the very worst of human nature.