Blind Eye by Stuart MacBride Harper, HK$91
The hard, pacy thrillers Stuart MacBride pens are not for the faint-hearted. When he writes a book called Blind Eye, for example, you can expect some optic gore. 'Someone had beaten the living hell out of the guy - broken his nose, knocked out a few teeth, but that was nothing. That barely merited a band-aid compared with what had happened to his eyes. Just like the others.' The 'others' are Aberdeen's Polish community who are being terrorised by the aforementioned thug who likes nothing better than a little deconstructive surgery. MacBride's hero is again DS Logan McRae, the sort of tough-talking but deep-down vulnerable copper who seems to be de rigueur in British crime fiction. Still scarred from his last encounter with a serial nutter (the creepy cannibal who munched his way through Flesh House), Logan is less than pleased to receive promises of escalating violence: 'You let them in ... These Polish animals take our jobs. They take our women ... I will blind them all, like I blinded the last one.' This cliche of racist hatred is written with words cut out of newspapers. MacBride just about avoids cliche in his own work. It is fearsome stuff, but achieved with passion and skill.