Perfect Remains

I would recommend Perfect Remains, but with conditions. If you want a fast, graphic serial-killer thriller where the police have to work backwards from deliberately misleading evidence, there is plenty here that works. If detailed torture bothers you, or if you lose patience when detectives become unusually dramatic people with unusually dramatic private lives, I would choose something else. This review discusses the killer, the victims who survive, and the ending, because the main reason I ended up with this mixed verdict is in how the investigation actually works.

The strongest thing in the book is Reginald King's method. We know from the beginning that he is the killer, so this is not a conventional question of identifying the murderer alongside the police. King kidnaps accomplished women, keeps them alive in a concealed section of his house, then murders other women and arranges the remains to convince police that his real captives are dead. Elaine Buxton's blood, tooth and scarf point towards the burned body in the Cairngorms. Later Jayne Magee's teeth and clothes support the identification of remains dissolved in sodium hydroxide. The evidence is real. The conclusion drawn from it is false. That distinction kept me reading.

I liked the investigation most when Callanach stopped asking what evidence had been left and started asking why it had been left. This is a practical question. At the Cairngorm bothy, a baseball bat is supposedly hidden but still discoverable, Elaine's tooth is nearby, and a piece of bloodied scarf survives beneath a stone. The scarf eventually matters because its edges are frayed rather than burned. It did not accidentally survive a fire. Someone prepared it for discovery. The same logic applies to the trolley discarded at Granton Harbour. King appears meticulous everywhere else, so why suddenly become careless at exactly those points where the police need evidence identifying a victim? Once Callanach says, in effect, that there are no mistakes here, the case becomes much more interesting.

That appealed to me because errors leave patterns. When somebody is careful through ten stages and apparently careless at the eleventh, I want to know whether the eleventh stage was really an error. Fields makes good use of this. The polished shoes seen by a witness also become useful. Professor Edwin Harris, the profiler imposed on Callanach, largely brushes that detail aside. Callanach later wears smooth-soled smart shoes back at the Cairngorm site and sees how little trace they leave compared with Salter's hiking boots. That is the kind of detection I enjoyed: take a detail, test it against the physical situation, and see whether the explanation still stands.

Harris provides the useful opposite. He decides the crimes are fundamentally sexual, assumes an escalating sexual offender, and constructs a profile around that theory. The police then find Rory Hand, a convicted rapist who enjoys the crime photographs and eventually confesses. The trouble is that his reaction to those photographs shows surprise before excitement. Callanach sees it. Hand knows about the case from the media and wants access to its horrors, but that is different from having committed the murders. Harris and Lively are so invested in getting a result that they nearly turn their assumptions into proof. When Hand cannot supply information about when and where he killed the women, the structure collapses. This part is a good warning about an investigation becoming too pleased with its own explanation.

Fields does not rely only on that large reversal. Smaller operational details repeatedly move the case. A witness notices a wheelie suitcase. Callanach tests whether a woman of Jayne's size can fit inside one by making his officers try it. Chloroform on Jayne's phone supports the kidnapping theory. The timing of its effects narrows what the abductor could have done before reaching his vehicle. A log book at an outdoor centre preserves names and registration numbers from lone hikers. Scrap-yard records, an old registration and finally Louis Jones lead towards the temporary vehicles King uses. None of these things solves the case alone. I prefer that to a detective suddenly having one brilliant revelation unsupported by the work that came before it.

There is, however, a great deal of ugliness to get through. Fields spends long stretches inside King's head while he removes teeth, beats feet with a ruler, pushes a needle beneath a fingernail, tortures Grace and eventually kills her by forcing chess pieces into her throat. Later Billie, only fourteen, has her throat cut while hanging upside down. These scenes are not coy. King constantly explains his cruelty to himself as education, discipline, improvement or necessity. That does establish his character. His self-image depends on converting sadism and resentment into evidence of intellectual superiority. But I did not need every demonstration at the length provided. After a point, the mechanism was established and another extended torture scene gave me more revulsion without much more understanding.

King himself is more effective when Fields concentrates on the small hypocrisies. He insists he is disciplined while repeatedly losing control. He calls himself intellectually exceptional while purchasing a dubious doctorate and resenting people with legitimate academic careers. He believes he is selecting women for their minds, yet he cannot tolerate disagreement. He regards himself as morally above sexual violence while degrading women and using threats of rape as control. Even his careful procedures contain vanity. The polished shoes are part of a ritual telling him he is properly prepared. His talking to himself, which he does when stressed, is finally one of the few uncontrolled clues he leaves. That all fits together.

The book is less disciplined with Luc Callanach. I liked him as an investigator much more than I liked the amount of material devoted to establishing how exceptional he is. He is a former Interpol agent, French-Scottish, extremely handsome, previously a model, an experienced skydiver, multilingual, good with frightened children, and damaged by a false rape allegation that destroyed his former life. Individual parts could work. Piled together, they started to feel designed. The narration even tells us early that his face could stop traffic and that being so attractive is a burden. I do not need that information repeated in various forms to understand a detective.

His personal history also produces one of the sections where my patience weakened most. Callanach goes skydiving because the case has overwhelmed him, flirts with Penny, gets sexual with her, discovers that his trauma still prevents him responding physically, and on a later jump deliberately delays opening his parachute until the automatic device saves him at 750 feet. This is serious material, and the novel does eventually connect it to the damage caused by Astrid Borde's accusation. But in the middle of an already elaborate serial-killer investigation, it felt like a second thriller was being installed inside the first. Then Astrid herself appears in Edinburgh, working in police finance, stalking Callanach, sending roses and champagne, and issuing Ava a death threat because she is jealous. Again, one complication becomes several.

Ava Turner worked better for me. She is funny without becoming incompetent, challenges Callanach when his management style is poor, and contributes useful thinking to the case. Her suggestion that they look first at the killer's ordinary personality rather than an abstract murderer helps Callanach understand the obsessive planning. Their developing friendship has some good scenes, particularly because Ava refuses to treat him as either an exotic Frenchman or a damaged object requiring constant handling. I did think the repeated material about Callanach's attractiveness and the possibility of romance became too obvious, especially by the final joke about whether Steve McQueen is better looking. Still, I believed the working partnership.

I am more divided on Ava's separate investigation into the abandoned babies. It eventually uncovers St Gerard Majella's, where pregnant girls have been confined, denied meaningful choices and physically punished. Felicity Costello is particularly effective because the case begins with a DNA result apparently identifying her twin Lucy, then moves through the identical-twin discrepancy to Felicity. Her interview with Callanach gives the investigation an emotional centre without needing a murderer's theatrics. The discovery that the girls made a pact to abandon their babies in order to expose what was happening is grim and memorable. But Ava's press statement condemning the Roman Catholic Church at large is written at such a temperature that the resulting suspension feels engineered partly to put her alone where King can abduct her. The machinery of the plot becomes visible.

That happens again near the end. The final chain is clever in outline. Callanach realises the cyclist's remembered phrase was not about going back to “the lane” at all, but about taking Jayne “back to Elaine.” From there, the possibility that Elaine is alive changes everything. Grace Smith's disappearance supplies a likely corpse double, and the witness descriptions connect through the mothball smell. Natasha then remembers that her administrator Reginald King attended or knew of public lectures by the women. Suddenly the ordinary university employee previously sitting near the edge of events moves into focus. This is satisfying because details planted much earlier finally have jobs to do.

At the same time, some of the police procedure requires generosity from the reader. Callanach takes Natasha directly to King's house before he has proper backup because he lacks formal grounds and fears losing the women. She predictably approaches the house herself. They enter through the garage, follow fresh blood, discover the concealed staircase and reach King while he is threatening his captives. It is exciting, certainly, but by then I was less interested in whether the scene was exciting than in whether these experienced people were making sensible decisions. Fields often chooses the more dramatic option.

The rescue itself is appropriately messy rather than triumphant. Billie dies before they can save her. Ava survives, as do Elaine and Jayne. Callanach uses a taser on King, and Elaine then asks whether she deserves something after what he has done. Callanach cannot officially permit retaliation, but silently indicates one blow. She drives the hammer into King's mouth and destroys his teeth. I understand the symmetry, and after hundreds of pages in King's company I certainly did not feel sorry for him. Still, I preferred the investigation's harder questions about evidence and responsibility to this neat piece of vengeance. It is satisfying in the immediate sense and less interesting morally than it first appears.

So the quantity at the end is clear enough. There is a strong procedural thriller here, especially in the planted evidence, the false identifications, the wheelie-case reconstruction, the mistakes in Harris's profile, and Callanach's eventual decision to investigate King's preparation rather than follow his staged clues. There is also a more sensational novel wrapped around it, full of extreme violence, highly dramatic personal histories and convenient collisions between the detectives' private lives and the case. Readers who enjoy dark, explicit serial-killer fiction and do not mind that combination will probably move through it very quickly. Readers wanting restrained violence, ordinary detectives or strict realism in police behaviour may find the excess distracting. I finished because I wanted to see whether the evidence against Elaine and Jayne would be correctly dismantled. That part earned my attention. The rest is why my recommendation comes with conditions.

The first problem is chapter one. Helen Fields lets the killer arrange a body, smash an arm to match an old fracture, drop gems in a mouth, and set a bothy on fire before I have met a single detective I care about. That is a specific complaint, not a general dislike of dark openings. I do not want the method as a product demo. I wanted the missing person file first. This review gets into the killer, the fake corpses, Ava Turner’s abduction, and the last rooms of the house, so if you want the investigation untouched, stop here.

I kept reading anyway. The demo turned out to be the point.

What I could not drop is the closed ticket that is still open. Elaine Buxton is a commercial lawyer, thirty-nine, divorced, no children, gym then home, freezer meals in single portions, a teddy on a wardrobe shelf, almost no photographs. She disappears after leaving a Friday class. Sixteen days later Braemar police have a burned bothy, a scrap of scarf under a rock, a baseball bat, and a tooth. DNA matches Elaine. Edinburgh upgrades the case from missing person to murder. There is a memorial with an outside screen because the church is full. Meanwhile Elaine is alive in a windowless suite that Reginald King built behind plaster and a second staircase, gums healing, learning Russian from tapes, watching her own service on a laptop. The decoy is a Glasgow sex worker whose name he never learned. He smashed her face, extracted teeth, broke the left upper arm where Elaine had an old cycling fracture, soaked the body, and burned it hot enough that marrow DNA was gone. The police received a completed identification. The actual account was still active. I kept checking that logic the way I check whether a setup wizard leaves an admin able to invite a colleague. You can finish every screen and still be blocked. You can finish a murder file and still have a living woman on a chain. That idea is ugly and it is the best thing in the book.

Callanach is a new DI in Police Scotland’s Major Investigations Team, half French, half Scots, Interpol transfer, second day on the job when the bothy call comes in. The squad speech is stiff. He writes his name on a board and tells them to speak slowly. Someone asks if bilingual is legal. DS Lively hates the appointment on sight and says so with the door open. I almost stopped there because the new-manager-meets-hostile-team scene is a default. I did not stop because Callanach’s actual habit is useful. He takes his own photos. He wants the hikers’ exact viewpoint and the colour of the flames so he can time when the killer left. He does not accept that a burned hut in Aberdeenshire is automatically not Edinburgh’s problem if the victim was taken from the city. Lively calls it a waste. Callanach tells him to multitask. It is not charming. It is the right failing case.

Then the second woman goes.

Reverend Jayne Magee, thirty-six, walks home from St Mary’s after evensong. The curry in the fridge is untouched. Her phone is in a bush with chloroform on it. A neighbour walking a dog sees a man with a huge wheelie case, mothball smell, and shiny lace-up shoes. A cyclist hears him talking to himself, something about a lane and the number twelve. Callanach tapes a rectangle on his office floor and makes Tripp and Salter curl up so he can check whether a thirty-four inch case can hold a bound woman. It is an embarrassing scene on the page. It is also the kind of test I respect. Do not argue the theory. Put a person in the box. The garage at Elaine’s building gets a second look too. Keys in the hallway were a deflection. He waited in the shrubs, followed the car in, used chloroform, then rolled the case out the side path. Later they find parallel wheel tracks in the gravel. That is dull, physical, and better than a speech about evil.

Ava Turner is the other DI, English boarding-school accent in a Scottish force, which the book treats as another inherited dislike. I liked her more than Callanach for a long stretch. She tells him to look for the person who diarises when they last changed the sheets, not a cinematic murderer. She eats an absurd box of popcorn at a 1958 film and puts a drunk on a pub floor with jiu jitsu while Callanach worries about dry-clean clothes. The baby-in-the-park case running next to the murders is not a subplot I expected to care about. Three infants, identical white towels, DNA that matches Lucy Costello until four SNPs show an identical twin. St Gerard Majella turns out to be a locked maternity warehouse for pregnant schoolgirls, named for the patron saint of expectant mothers, caning included, phones confiscated, windows sealed. Felicity talks because Callanach was the first adult who helped her sit down. Ava says the quiet part at a press conference and gets fourteen days’ suspension. That strand is almost a second novel. I still wanted it, because it is the same problem in a different costume: a completed moral process that leaves living people damaged, and a dashboard that calls the outcome holy.

King should have been a cartoon and mostly is not, until he is. He is an administrator who self-publishes a philosophy book, buys an online doctorate, and cannot get faculty to treat the title as real. Professor Natasha Forge, Ava’s old pony-club friend, keeps him waiting with a raised finger. He talks to himself. He polishes shoes before a kidnapping. He plays a Spanish CD in the car after a burning. He files a fake sick note for gastroenteritis. He tries to book Professionals Against Abortion as a speaker because it will annoy Natasha. He fits dentures and hits soles with a ruler and calls it Sohlenstreich because his father taught him. The hidden room has pastel walls and classical music. He wants debate. He gets screaming. When Elaine will not cooperate he brings Jayne as backup. When Callanach tells the press Jayne is alive, King goes back to Glasgow for another body double. Chloroform, sack, electric razor, pliers, Amazing Grace while he pulls teeth, then a chess game for the woman’s life which Jayne wins. After that he forces the pieces down Grace’s throat. That last sequence is the point where I put the book down for a few minutes. Not because I failed to understand it. Because the identity swap was already clear and the extra cruelty started to look like volume.

I still needed the next operational beat.

Callanach goes back to Braemar instead of sitting on Harris’s profile. Harris is a church-funded profiler with a beard and a certainty problem. He wants a chaotic sexual offender who cannot hold a job, who dates women he finds non-threatening, who panics and leaves trophies. The evidence is shiny shoes, mothballs, chloroform, a bothy off the hiking trail, a barrel of lye at Granton Harbour, a trolley dumped where the tide will return it with a sack of clothes. Callanach and Salter walk the trail in rain. He looks at the scarf fragment. The blood is a regular small pool, not spatter. The edges are frayed, not burned. The baseball bat and tooth sit uphill from any rational path back to a car. He says the killer wanted them found. Research the research, not the gifts. That is the sentence I kept. If someone ships you a completed incident, do not close it. Ask what they needed you to believe. The outdoor centre at the south end of the pass keeps a log of solo walkers and licence plates because people fall. They lift names going back months. One plate belongs to a written-off car that should have been crushed in Falkirk. That is a lead you can put on a Monday list.

The Granton barrel is supposed to be Jayne. Hair in the rim matches. Lower teeth match her records. Upper teeth missing. Sodium hydroxide, about two days, and then a night guard knocks the barrel over and wrecks the floor. Ailsa Lambert later says the teeth and bone did not degrade at the same rate, which only makes sense if the teeth went in separately. Jonty Spurr finds forceps marks below the gum line on Elaine’s recovered tooth. Callanach finally hears the cyclist again. Not “the lane.” Back to Elaine. Twelve minutes. They are not dead. He has been working a murder file on living hostages. I felt the click the way you feel it when a customer’s setup-complete metric is explained by an inherited role that still blocks invites. Relief, then anger at how long the green light lasted.

The book does not stay clean after that. Callanach has been stealing small objects from victims’ homes, Elaine’s glass paperweight, Jayne’s globe key ring, later a child’s prayer slate from Ava’s drawer, and keeping them like a shrine. I did not believe it as character. It is also a firing offence in any force I would trust. There is a skydiving chapter where he fails to pull the main chute, gets banned, and the book explains a year of impotence after a false rape accusation in Lyon by Astrid Borde. Then Astrid is in Edinburgh police admin, sent the roses and the Cristal, wrote Ava a death threat on station paper, watched the abduction with binoculars, and trades a plate number for immunity. That entire strand is a different novel glued to this one. I understand why Fields wanted Callanach damaged. I did not need the drop zone or the field with Penny to accept that he is bad at asking for a drink. The abduction of Ava is cleaner without it. King copies Natasha’s house key from a pigeonhole, leaves a heart in a freezer, then letters that spell COMING and TOMORROW. He bets Ava cannot stay away from her friend’s street even while suspended. Chloroform through a cracked car window. Cable ties. A hidden staircase he describes as his father’s old escape from his mother’s moods. Ava meets Elaine and Jayne, who are legally dead and still breathing.

The last rooms are the test of whether this is investigation or performance. King cannot hire another throwaway car, so he uses his own, drives to Dundee, and picks up a girl who turns out to be fourteen. She vomits in the passenger seat. He hammers her in the hallway, hangs her from a beam, and tells Ava to kill Jayne or Elaine or he cuts the child’s throat. Natasha knocks on the front door, which is stupid and also the only knock King would answer. Callanach finds blood still wet, mothballs in a curtain, finger marks on a panel, a nick by a keyhole. Ava has the key in the lock. King cuts the girl’s throat anyway while Natasha holds her hand. Callanach tasers him. Elaine, no longer cuffed, smashes his mouth with the hammer. Callanach holds up one finger. One blow. I am not going to pretend I found that morally tidy. I am going to say the book had earned a consequence that was not another speech. Jayne wants a trial. Elaine wants teeth for teeth. The book lets both stand. Annabelle Buxton’s letter, which Callanach reads on the drive to Strathallan, asked him not to give up. He does not get to tell her the first identification was a product the killer shipped. That silence is worse than the bothy.

I am recommending Perfect Remains. Not because it is subtle. It is not. Not because King is a great mind. He is a petty administrator with a ruler and a secret room, which is worse and more accurate. I am recommending it because the investigation keeps failing the obvious dashboard and then, late, does the unglamorous work. Door-to-door. Wheel tracks. A logbook. A scrap-yard owner squeezed by health and safety. An informant named Louis who followed a cash customer to a Causewayside lockup that is empty when they force the door. The empty garage is the right kind of disappointment. King had already allowed for that loss. The thing he could not plan was being overheard talking to himself, and a pathologist looking at enamel a second time for the wrong reason. Harris is allowed to be funded, credentialed, and wrong. Lively is allowed to be grieving, insubordinate, and later useful enough to offer a resignation Callanach bins. Tripp is keen in a way that would get mocked in a meeting and still searches for the trolley. Callanach remains a snob about coffee and still measures a suitcase. The torture is specific. I will not recap more of it. The school case is angrier than the murders and I think Fields knows it. The ending does not fix Callanach. He still has the slate in his pocket when he visits Ava. He still will not tell her the whole truth about the chute. He does agree to a midnight film. That is a small, practical close, which is the only kind I trust after a book that spent this many pages proving that a completed file can be a lie.

If you read crime for the moment a clever man explains the universe, look elsewhere. If you read it to watch people test a claim against mud, teeth, and a checklist that came back too neat, this one held me. I started annoyed at the opening tour of the pyre. I finished wanting the next case, not because I like Callanach, but because I want to see whether he keeps refusing the green light.

This is the sort of book they put on the same table as the other Scottish crime thrillers: a new inspector, a burned bothy in the Cairngorms, and a killer who has already decided which scraps of evidence you are allowed to find. I finished Perfect Remains. I am going to talk about who did it, the fake corpses, Ava Turner being taken, and how it ends, the way I would warn a mate before he spent another three evenings on it.

Helen Fields starts with Dr Reginald King laying a woman out in a stone hut, breaking an arm so it will match an old fracture, tipping white gems into her mouth, soaking her in accelerant overnight, grinding a scrap of silk scarf under a rock, then leaving a metal baseball bat and a tooth under stones for the dogs. He drives back toward Edinburgh with a Spanish language CD on. Before you have a proper look at Detective Inspector Luc Callanach, you already know the body in the bothy is not going to be who Police Scotland think it is. The rest of the novel is largely the squad catching up with a trick the reader was handed before breakfast. King even talks to himself in the car, hits the brakes for a rabbit, and drinks flask coffee at the outskirts so he will not be on CCTV. It is all very complete. It is also the wrong order if you wanted a mystery rather than a guided tour of someone else's homework.

I nearly stopped there.

Callanach is on his second day with the Major Investigations Team in a grey Edinburgh building. He is half French, half Scots, lately of Interpol, and Fields will not let any of that sit quietly. He writes his name on a board. Someone at the back swears. A blonde officer makes a joke about bilingual being legal. He tells them to phone their mothers if they want to complain. Then DI Ava Turner appears in dress uniform, tells him a sergeant asked why they had been sent an underwear model, and offers whisky at one in the morning which he refuses on the grounds of professional boundaries. DS Lively spends the early chapters treating him like a tourist who has pinched someone else's desk. Callanach shoves Lively across a briefing room hard enough that other officers have to catch him. Later he visits Elaine Buxton's immaculate flat in Albyn Place, notes the absence of photographs and plants, finds a ragged teddy on a wardrobe shelf, and takes her black glass paperweight home. Still later he finds a miniature globe on a key ring from Jayne Magee's dressing table and keeps that too, under the pillow, as if caring required souvenirs. I do not need a detective who steals from the dead to prove he is haunted. I need one who looks at a peat floor, a fire that burned hot enough to shift stone, unburned scarf edges, and a tooth with gum still attached, and asks why those particular items survived so neatly. Jonty Spurr, the Aberdeenshire pathologist, is quiet and useful. The hikers saw an orange dot. The fire engines tore up the tyre marks. Callanach gets to the planted-evidence point eventually, but only after you have sat through his awful station coffee, his Albany Street flat, his mother bouncing his emails, and a skydiving trip to Strathallan that has almost nothing to do with Elaine Buxton or Jayne Magee and a great deal to do with him not being able to feel anything.

That paperweight.

King works as an administrator in the University of Edinburgh's Department of Philosophy under Professor Natasha Forge, who does not take him seriously and will not call him anything but Dr King with the patience of someone filling a form. He has built a hidden suite at the back of his house: twelve steps down into the cellar, a panel with a keyhole, twelve steps back up behind plaster and soundproofing. He keeps Elaine Buxton alive after the world has identified a Glasgow prostitute's burned bones as hers. He needs the left humerus smashed because Elaine came off a bicycle as a teenager. He beats the prostitute's face in with the baseball bat in front of Elaine so the teeth and jaw will not compare. Then he nurses Elaine's gums, tries to fit dentures, hits the soles of her feet with a wooden ruler and names it Sohlenstreich, makes her watch a film of her own memorial service with Abide With Me, and puts Russian language tapes on because she already speaks French. When she will not play along he fetches Reverend Jayne Magee in a wheelie case after chloroform at Ravelston Park. Isabel Yale, walking her Airedale, notices mothballs and shiny black lace-ups. Liam Granger on a bike hears a man talking to himself about a lane and the number twelve, which Callanach later decides was Elaine and a twelve-minute drive. King then goes back to Govanhill for Grace, a woman too old and heavy to be a clean double, shaves her head, pulls teeth while singing Amazing Grace, and later, after Jayne beats him at chess while he is exhausted, stuffs carved pieces down Grace's throat until she dies. I understand the intention. You are meant to be trapped in the room with them. What I got was a man who cannot stop lecturing. He quotes John Donne. He argues theology at a vicar he has chained to a bed. He seethes about Natasha's green suit and the time Human Resources made her interview him. Every time the police plot thins, we go back to the guest suite for another seminar.

Give over.

The police work is not all noise. Chloroform on Jayne's phone, the largest wheelie case Salter can buy, Tripp taped up so they can measure whether a bound woman would fit, double wheel tracks in the gravel outside Elaine's garage, sodium hydroxide in a barrel at Granton Harbour with hair caught in the rim: those stretches feel like someone following water downhill. Then the book splits itself. Ava is dealing with babies left in a park in identical white towelling. DNA on clotted blood looks like Lucy Costello until Ailsa Lambert finds four mutations and an identical twin, Felicity, hidden at St Gerard Majella's, a locked manor with sealed windows and a cane on Sister Ernestine's desk. The girls are pregnant. The patron saint of expectant mothers is not an accident. Felicity talks to Callanach because he was the first person who helped her. Ava raids the school, arrests the nun for assault, and then stands up at a press conference and tells the Roman Catholic Church it should answer for torture. I do not object to the subject. Susan would not either. I object to it sitting in the middle of a serial-killer investigation like a second novel that refused to wait. You cannot drive to Braemar, sit through a DNA farce with twins, return to King's cellar, watch white roses arrive with a card about thorns, then take a death threat slipped under Ava's office door, and still feel you are reading one case. By the time King copies Natasha's house key from her pigeonhole, leaves a cow's heart in her freezer and letters spelling COMING and TOMORROW, then chloroform-gags Ava out of her Mercedes under a tree because she would not stay away, I had stopped trusting the book to finish any one job before starting the next.

The last third is where the frustration stopped being local and became the whole structure. Astrid Borde, who accused Callanach of rape in Lyon and then withdrew, is working in the station's accounts under another name. She sent the roses and the Cristal. She watched King take Ava, wrote down the Nissan plate, and sat on it until the Procurator Fiscal offered immunity and a promise of no new injunction. Louis Jones, who hires untraceable cars for cash, finally gives them a Causewayside lock-up after Natasha, cooking omelette in Callanach's kitchen, mentions that mothballs remind her of her administrator. The garage is empty. Of course it is. Callanach and Natasha go to King's inherited house anyway, see blood on the wallpaper, crowbar the garage, find vomit and worse in a passenger footwell, then the cupboard under the stairs and the panel with finger marks. Up the hidden flight they hear screaming. Inside, King has a fourteen-year-old, Billie, hanging from a beam by her ankles. He wants Ava to choose, with a hammer, between Jayne and Elaine. Jayne offers herself and asks Ava to cover her face. Then Callanach fires a taser. Elaine, who has been under a bed, smashes King's mouth with the hammer. Callanach, if I read it right, lets her have that one blow. The book wants this to feel like a kind of justice. It felt like the plot running out of better ideas and matching an injury to an injury.

I sat there with the telly off.

As it stands, Perfect Remains is a novel about a killer who plants evidence the way some people set out a garden, and about detectives who are handed the next object just as they are about to stall. King is never not talking. Callanach is never not foreign, good-looking, and privately wrecked. Ava is the one who can actually do the job, until she is giving a lecture on punishment, until she is abducted, until she is the moral centre in a room of blood and chess pieces. The secret rooms are described as if a paragraph of pastel walls and classical music made the building work. I kept thinking about the footprint. You do not add a parallel staircase, a windowless suite, a shower, and enough soundproofing to hide screaming in an ordinary house without the heating, the waste, and the plan form going wrong. Fields does not care. She cares that King can quote Seneca to Ava while she is cuffed to a bedpost. That is the trouble when this kind of thriller starts performing intelligence instead of doing the graft. You get speeches. You get the bothy, the barrel, the trolley in the mud at Granton with Magee's clothes in a sack, the Lagavulin Jonty Spurr sends Ava after her press conference, the fishing rod she leaves wrapped at Callanach's door. You do not get a sequence that would survive a proper look at the as-built.

I am not asking for a quiet book. I read crime. I can take violence if it is doing a job. Here the violence is a display, and the display repeats: teeth, feet, a needle under a nail, chess pieces, a hanging child whose mother put her on the street. Each time King tells you why, often while talking to himself. Each time Callanach stares at a map, drinks red wine, and feels personally responsible because he held a press conference. Professor Edwin Harris arrives with church money, a beard, and a sexual-offender profile Callanach does not believe. They charge Rory Hand, who confesses after being shown photographs he had already seen on the news. Then they have to unpick it. Lively nearly resigns. Begbie wants overtime sheets signed in full. None of that is false to how organisations behave. All of it is arranged so that the cleverness stays with King and the mess stays with everyone else. The ending tries to tidy Felicity into a mother-and-baby unit, Sister Ernestine into prison, Harris into a footnote, and Callanach into a man who might go to the pictures to see High Noon. It treats four hundred pages of slaughter and lectures as a bit of bother that friendship and a gin can rinse.

I finished it because I had started it, and because I wanted to know whether Elaine and Jayne were actually dead. They were not. That is the one twist chapter one already spent if you were paying attention to the gems, the planted tooth, and the woman screaming in the hidden room while the bones were on Spurr's table. Right. I would not hand this to anyone and tell them it was a proper job. If you want Edinburgh, Police Scotland, and a disposal site chosen with a map, there are cleaner ways to spend the hours. This one left me arguing with a secret staircase, a man who would not shut up, and a detective who thought a stolen paperweight was the same as leaving someone a route back.

I cannot stop thinking about the thirty-four-inch rolling suitcase. Before I get into exactly what this book is, I should warn you that this review discusses the ending, the killer’s identity, and several late reveals, so consider that before reading further. But the suitcase is the detail that lodged in my brain. A middle-aged man subdues an adult woman with chloroform, folds her unconscious body into a massive piece of soft-sided black luggage, and simply wheels her down a quiet residential street in Edinburgh to a waiting car. It is such an intensely practical, mundane solution to the physical nightmare of kidnapping that it completely reset my expectations for Helen Fields’s Perfect Remains. I picked this up expecting a standard, slightly exhausting serial killer thriller where a brooding detective chases a theatrical genius who leaves poetic clues at crime scenes. I expected to roll my eyes and abandon it halfway through when the police inevitably withheld information from each other for the sake of the plot. Instead, I found myself reading late into the night, surprisingly hooked, because the violence in this book is rooted in the heavy, logistical reality of managing human bodies. It is a deeply dark, grisly crime novel that actually respects the mechanism of how things work, and that mechanical grounding is what ultimately sold me on it.

My initial resistance was entirely centered on the protagonist, Detective Inspector Luc Callanach. Fields introduces him as a half-French, half-Scottish former Interpol agent who has just transferred to Police Scotland under a cloud of mysterious disgrace. He is described as being so staggeringly attractive that female officers literally stop in the corridors to stare at him, and he spends his first few days barking orders, refusing to socialize, and brooding in his barren apartment. I have very little patience for the tortured genius trope, especially when the genius is accompanied by a tragic backstory involving a false rape accusation that ruined his career in France. It felt engineered to make him perfectly wounded but morally spotless. When he first arrived in Edinburgh and immediately shoved a hostile sergeant against a wall, I prepared myself for three hundred pages of a maverick cop breaking the rules while everyone else marvels at his brilliance. But Fields does something clever with Callanach. She allows him to be genuinely out of his depth. He does not magically solve the case by staring at a whiteboard. He makes mistakes, struggles to interpret the Scottish colloquialisms of his team, and is heavily reliant on the people around him to actually push the investigation forward. The brooding never entirely goes away, but it becomes a manageable background hum rather than the sole engine of the plot.

The real reason this book works so well, and the element that completely reversed my expectations, is the killer himself. We learn his identity early on. Dr. Reginald King is an administrator in the philosophy department at the University of Edinburgh. He is not a glamorous mastermind. He is a deeply insecure, socially awkward, middle-aged man who is constantly belittled by the academic staff he serves, particularly a brilliant, icy female professor named Natasha Forge. His motivation for kidnapping highly successful professional women is rooted in a pathetic, festering need for validation. He does not just want to kill them. He wants to trap them in a hidden room he built behind a false wall in his cellar and force them to engage in high-level academic debates. He wants a captive audience that has no choice but to recognize his supposed genius. The psychological profile is chilling because it is so recognizable: the aggrieved, mediocre man who believes the world owes him the respect he hasn't earned. Fields puts us inside King's head as he meticulously plans his crimes, and his internal monologue is a fascinating mixture of grandiose delusion and petty administrative irritation. He gets annoyed when he has to clean up a mess that ruins his polished shoes. He is terrifying precisely because he treats abduction and murder as a series of logistical tasks to be managed, right down to buying the right groceries to feed his captives.

As a nurse, I am notoriously difficult to please when it comes to medical trauma and bodily mechanics in fiction. Authors usually rely on magic chemicals or impossible anatomy to make their plots work. Fields, however, does the work, and the grim physical reality of King’s crimes is what elevates the tension. King does not just kidnap women. He kidnaps marginalized women, specifically prostitutes, to serve as corpses, murdering them and destroying their bodies in ways designed to perfectly mimic his real targets, thereby convincing the police that the professional women are dead. The forensic details are staggering. To swap an identity, King breaks an arm with a baseball bat to match an old teenage fracture, smashes teeth out of a live woman's mouth with pliers so he can leave them at a burn site, and calculates the exact concentration of sodium hydroxide needed to dissolve a human pelvis inside a plastic barrel over forty-eight hours. The scene where the police find the barrel at the harbor, and the pathologist explains that the lower teeth survived because they were placed in the chemical bath hours after the jawbone, is a masterful piece of procedural writing. It isn't just gore for the sake of shock value. It is a mechanical puzzle that Callanach and his team have to dismantle. I appreciate a narrative that acknowledges the sheer physical difficulty of destroying a human body. King has to drag dead weight up stairs, deal with the stench of accelerating decomposition, and manage the horrific side effects of administering repeated doses of chloroform. Fields never lets the reader forget that bodies are heavy, messy, and stubborn things.

That is not to say the book is without friction. While the primary plot is tightly wound, Fields occasionally relies on secondary characters who behave with such manufactured stupidity that I found myself gripping my Kindle in annoyance. Callanach’s subordinate, Detective Sergeant Lively, is a walking cliché of the hostile, insubordinate local cop who resents the new boss. His constant undermining crosses the line into fireable incompetence, and the fact that he isn't immediately suspended stretches belief. Similarly, the introduction of a retired profiler named Professor Harris, who sweeps in to confidently deliver an entirely wrong assessment of the killer, feels like an obstacle engineered purely to delay the investigation. Then there is a jarring subplot involving a secretive Catholic school for pregnant teenagers that practically operates as a prison. While it provides an avenue for the police to uncover a separate horror, it feels bolted onto the main narrative, dragging the pacing down just as the hunt for King should be accelerating. When the police raid the school and uncover systemic abuse, it reads like a completely different novel briefly interrupting the serial killer thriller I signed up for. These structural detours do not destroy the book, but they do require a certain amount of patience to get through.

What grounds the police work and compensates for the procedural delays is the presence of Detective Inspector Ava Turner. If Callanach is the brooding outsider, Ava is the competent, unapologetic anchor of the narrative. I absolutely loved her. She is pragmatic, sharply intelligent, and completely unimpressed by the posturing of the men around her. When she handles a drunken, violent ex-boyfriend in a pub using a quick jiu-jitsu sweep, or when she bluntly refuses to follow administrative protocols that hinder her work, she acts as the perfect counterbalance to Callanach's heavy introspection. Their dynamic is the emotional core of the novel. Fields builds a partnership based on mutual professional respect rather than immediate romantic entanglement. Ava treats Callanach like a peer, calling him out when he wallows in self-pity and forcing him to integrate with the team. When King eventually targets Ava, luring her out of her car in the middle of the night using her loyalty to Natasha as bait, the stakes instantly become agonizingly real. Because Fields has taken the time to establish Ava as a highly capable, fiercely independent woman, watching her bound to a table and shoved into King's underground nightmare is genuinely distressing. You aren't just watching a generic victim suffer. You are watching someone who knows exactly how bad her situation is, calculating her odds of survival while trying to protect the other women trapped in the room with her.

The climax of the novel earns every ounce of its tension. King does not just threaten Ava. He attempts to force her to murder a fourteen-year-old girl with a hammer to save the life of the captive reverend, Jayne Magee. The psychological cruelty of putting a police officer in an impossible moral bind is a brilliant culmination of King's desire to break strong women. When Callanach and Natasha finally breach the hidden room, the resolution is brutal and messy. Fields does not offer a clean, heroic rescue where everyone walks away unscarred. The girl dies, Natasha is broken by the violence, and Elaine Buxton is so deeply traumatized that she takes the hammer and shatters King's teeth before the police can secure him. It is an ugly, chaotic aftermath that feels entirely true to the trauma these characters have endured. Perfect Remains is not a flawless book. It has pacing issues, and some of the police bureaucracy is exaggerated for conflict. But the things it does well, like the unsparing mechanical detail, the terrifyingly mundane villain, and the genuine respect it has for the physical reality of violence, are executed with a level of competence that is rare in the genre. I spent a few nights losing sleep over this one, not just because I wanted to see how it ended, but because I could not stop thinking about the absolute, crushing weight of that thirty-four-inch suitcase. I recommend it without hesitation.

I stopped at chapter twenty-three, a little under halfway through, right after Felicity Costello finally gives up the name of the second girl from the convent school. That's the last page I actually read start to finish. I want to say that up front because I know how this looks, a grown man giving up on a paperback thriller, but I've got a rule about my time and this book broke the rule before it broke anything else.

Here's what got me to buy in, for anyone deciding whether to start this one. The first quarter or so is genuinely well built. The wheelie-case measuring scene, where the detective has his constables lie down on the office floor to see if a body could physically fold into a thirty-four inch case, that's the kind of detail I respect in a story. Somebody thought about it. Same with the twelve-minute drive calculation and the chloroform timing question to the pathologist, how long before she wakes up, how far can he realistically walk her before she comes around. That's a scope worked out properly, the kind of thing I'd want from a subcontractor before I signed off on a job. I was on board. I told my wife it was a decent one, better than the last two I'd started and put down.

Then the plan starts running long, and not in a good way. The killer's chapters are where I lost my patience first. There's a scene with a wooden ruler on a woman's bare feet where he explains, mid-beating, that the Germans have a word for it and his father taught him about it as a child. Then later he pulls teeth out with pliers while singing Amazing Grace, working the hymn verse by verse to match his own rhythm. I get what the author's going for. Menace, control, a man who's rehearsed his own cruelty so many times it's become liturgy. But it stops reading like a person and starts reading like a performance for an audience that isn't in the room. Real cruelty doesn't need a soundtrack. The first time somebody talks to himself out loud while he's doing something terrible, fine, that's a tell, a witness even catches him at it later and it becomes a clue. By the third or fourth monologue, singing hymns, quoting Seneca, giving speeches about intellectual superiority to a woman he's just mutilated, it stopped feeling like character and started feeling like the writer couldn't trust the violence to land on its own.

What actually finished me off wasn't the killer, though. It was the convent. Somewhere around chapter twenty the investigation just changes jobs on you. The Buxton and Magee case, the one the whole book is supposedly about, gets set down so the detectives can go uncover a completely separate horror involving a private school that force-birthed pregnant teenagers and beat them with canes. That's an awful thing to write about and I'm not saying it doesn't deserve a book. But it's a different book. I run into this at work more than you'd think, a client signs for one scope of service and halfway through the contract they want you handling something that was never on the proposal, and you either renegotiate the price and the timeline or you tell them no. This book never renegotiates with the reader. It just starts billing you for a second investigation you didn't ask for, using the same detectives, the same forty-eight hours, and somehow still expects you to care equally about both. I didn't sign up to read a book about a school for forced pregnancies wrapped inside a book about a serial killer's obsession with a philosophy professor's best friend. Pick one. Do it well. Don't try to run two crews out of one van.

I'll give credit where it's due. The Callanach and Lively friction, the new French-Scottish inspector nobody respects yet, that's a believable office problem and it's handled with some restraint, at least in what I read. The bit where Callanach shoves his sergeant and then has to live with it, and the sergeant later shows up asking to handle the church witnesses because he actually attends that church, that's a real workplace beat. People do behave that way. It cost him nothing to write it straight, no ruler, no hymn, no speech about intellectual superiority. I noticed it because it was the exception.

But then you've got Ava Turner's skydiving jump where Callanach nearly doesn't pull his own chute, and an ex from France named Astrid who turns out to be working in the same building under a fake haircut, and a stalker subplot involving a friend of Ava's getting a cow's heart left in her freezer, and a suspended detective, and a wrongly arrested serial confessor who gets fed crime scene photos before he confesses to anything. That's four separate threads running at the same time as the convent thread and the original murder thread, and I hadn't even gotten to whatever's supposed to happen with the actual investigation once Felicity starts naming names. Every one of those threads is asking for the same attention the last one got, and none of them have finished paying off yet. I kept a mental tally like I would on an account that's overdue on three different invoices, and by chapter twenty-two the tally just didn't clear.

I want to be fair about what I can and can't say here, since I know this book keeps going for another twenty-six chapters past where I stopped. I have no idea whether the convent thread gets folded back into the main case in a way that actually earns the detour, or whether the killer's monologuing tightens up once the plot moves faster, or how the ending lands. Maybe it's terrific. Maybe the last third snaps everything into focus and I'd feel foolish for bailing. I can't judge that because I didn't read it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I can judge is the two hundred plus pages I did read, and in those pages the book kept adding scope without ever finishing a job it had already started.

That's the actual reason I stopped, not squeamishness, not boredom exactly. It was the accumulation. One overwrought villain monologue I can read past. A second investigation grafted onto the first, I can grumble about and keep going. Four more subplots stacked on top of that, all demanding the same emotional investment as the murder that got me to pick the book up in the first place, that's where I ran out of runway. I don't finish every job I start either, if I'm honest, there's a bathroom at my house that's been three weekends deep for going on two years now. But I know the difference between a job that's taking longer than planned and one where somebody keeps changing what the job even is. This was the second kind.

So, didn't finish. Stopped at chapter twenty-three, roughly forty percent in. The parts I read had real procedural bones and one villain who talks like he's auditioning for a stage production of himself. I closed it on a Tuesday and didn't open it again on Wednesday, and by Thursday I'd started something else instead. That's the whole verdict, really. It never asked me to keep the appointment; it kept moving the appointment on me.

Okay, so early on a profiler in this book, Professor Harris, tells the whole squad the killer is chaotic, impulsive, the kind of guy who can't hold a job or a relationship. That's basically the opposite of what's actually happening on the page, and it bugged me every time he opened his mouth, because the killer in this book is running a small, badly named logistics operation, and it takes way too long for anyone in the room to notice.

Fair warning before I go further: I'm going to talk about the ending, who the killer is, and the thing with the teeth. If you haven't read it and don't want that spoiled, come back after.

For me this book wasn't really about the horror, even though there's plenty of that. It was about supply chains. Bodies, cars, garages, evidence, all of it moving through a system, and the system had a weak point somewhere. The whole plot is basically the detective, Callanach, finding that weak point. That's the part I actually cared about.

The scene that got me was small. Callanach thinks a woman was pulled to the abduction site inside a wheelie case, so he makes a constable lie on the floor and measures him with a tape measure to check whether a person actually fits. Then he sends someone out to buy the actual case and test it for real. That's not TV-detective intuition, that's just checking the real dimensions instead of guessing. I respected him for that more than for anything he said in an interview room.

Same with the shoe thing. A witness says the man she saw smelled like mothballs and had shiny black shoes in the rain, which sounds like a throwaway detail except it's exactly the kind of thing a real person would notice, because it's out of place. Nobody polishes their shoes to go dump a body. Except this guy does, because for him the polish is part of the ritual. That felt true to how obsessive people actually behave, not how films think they behave.

The big one, the thing the whole case turns on, is the teeth. The pathologist keeps saying the marks on the enamel don't match a baseball bat and the upper jaw is missing completely, and eventually Callanach works out the teeth were pulled with forceps before the body was burned, not smashed out after. Which means the corpse in the fire might not be who everyone assumed. That's a genuinely good twist, not because it shocks you on its own, but because it means every piece of "evidence" the killer left, the bat, the scarf, the one tooth with the DNA, was staged on purpose. He wasn't sloppy. He was building a story for the police to find, and he built it well enough that an entire department believed it for weeks.

Once I understood that, I went back over every earlier clue in my head and realised none of it was an accident. That's the kind of reveal that rewards you for paying attention, instead of just pulling the rug for the sake of it.

I'll say the killer's own chapters are a lot. He sings hymns while pulling out someone's teeth, he talks to himself in the car, he's got a whole backstory involving a dead sister, a chess set, and a professor who wouldn't hire him. Some of that does real work, setting up why he needs to be taken seriously. A lot of it is just extra. I don't need every villain monologue to double as a psychology seminar. But it didn't kill the book for me, because even when he's being dramatic he's still doing something with a mechanism behind it, the chloroform dose, the sodium hydroxide concentration adjusted so the bones dissolve at a specific rate. Even his cruelty comes with a spec sheet.

Weirdly, the bit I found most believable wasn't the murder stuff at all. It was his day job. A university administrator calling himself Dr King off an online doctorate, resenting the professor who wouldn't promote him, faking a sick note, booking the wrong guest speaker out of spite. I've had a manager like that, minus the murders, obviously. The petty office politics were more recognisable to me than most of the crime scenes.

There's a second plot running alongside the main one, about babies left in a park and a school basically holding pregnant teenagers prisoner, and I get why some readers found that a distraction. It didn't bother me the way it might have, because that subplot also gets solved through an actual mechanism, a DNA test matching an identical twin instead of the actual suspect, which is a real thing that happens and a real reason a lead looks wrong when it isn't. It's not filler. It's a second system with its own weak point.

The Callanach backstory with Astrid, the false rape accusation from his old life in France, felt like more than the plot needed. It explains why he's guarded and won't let anyone touch him, basically, and it does that job, but it runs longer than it earns.

Ava Turner I liked without really thinking about her much while reading, which is probably the sign of a character who's doing her job properly. She's competent, funny in a dry way, and she doesn't exist just to be rescued, even when she ends up needing rescuing. That's more than I expected going in.

Even DS Lively's turnaround worked for me, and I went in expecting to hate it. He's not redeemed by some big speech about growth. He's redeemed because the victim went to his church, and that's a small, specific, believable reason for a difficult man to shut up and do his job properly for once.

I don't need pretty writing. I need the numbers to add up. The prose here is mostly plain and functional, and it only gets purple in the killer's head. That's fine by me. A thriller doesn't have to sound nice if the mechanism underneath it holds together, and this one mostly does.

The ending works because it comes back to logistics too. Callanach doesn't win with a speech, he wins with a taser he brought and a distance he'd already worked out, eighteen feet, enough time or not enough time. Even the one act of violence the victims get to inflict on their captor is measured, one blow, not a killing blow, signalled with a single raised finger instead of five. That's a cold, practical kind of mercy, and it fits everything that came before it.

There's a preview chapter for the next book at the end, and I read the whole thing on my lunch break instead of going back to whatever I was actually meant to be reading for uni, which tells you something.

I'd tell a friend this straight: it's grim, there's a torture scene with pliers and a hymn that will sit with you longer than you want, so don't start it right before a shift. But if what you actually want is a killer whose plan gets taken apart piece by piece because the detective checks the real measurements instead of trusting the story he's been handed, this delivers. Basically, everyone in this book who trusts the label over the actual model gets it wrong, and everyone who checks gets it right. I'm on the side of the checkers, and yes, I'd recommend it. I already started the next one.

Perfect Remains works by giving the reader information the police do not have and then making the police assemble a completely different version of events from evidence deliberately left for them. We know almost immediately that Reginald King has abducted Elaine Buxton, killed another woman as her substitute and arranged the burned remains in the Cairngorms so that Elaine will be declared dead. That changes the usual murder mystery question. We are not waiting to discover who did it. We are watching to see when DI Luc Callanach will realise that the evidence on which his investigation depends has effectively been prepared for him by the murderer. This review does get into the ending, the women King kills and the identity trick in full, so I am not preserving the later surprises. What kept me interested was less the answer, which the reader already has, than the people dealing with the answer badly, well or somewhere in between. Of those people, Ava Turner was comfortably the one I wanted to spend most time with. Callanach is meant to be the central detective, King gets a great many pages inside his unpleasant head, but Ava is the person who repeatedly makes the book feel awake.

Callanach is introduced on his second day with Police Scotland, newly arrived from France, already anticipating jokes about being half-French and half-Scottish, and determined to establish authority. There is quite a lot about his looks, including the assertion that he is so handsome it causes practical difficulties, which I found a bit much. More interesting is the way he manages people, because the book gives him exactly the sort of problem that does not disappear merely because somebody is clever. His opening instruction that investigations fail when people do not pass information along is sensible. His insistence that rank does not excuse blaming junior people is sensible too. Then he spends a fair portion of the novel snapping at staff, antagonising DS Lively, physically shoving him during an argument and struggling with ordinary courtesy. Ava spots the problem. Her point that detectives may obey a boss who never says please or thank you but will not take pleasure in working hard for him is one of the sharper bits of character writing in the book. I spend my working life noticing the gap between having authority and getting useful cooperation, so Callanach interested and irritated me in about equal measure. Tripp and Salter do much of the actual following up, interviewing, measuring, checking and retrieving, and the investigation works best when Callanach recognises what they contribute rather than performing as a solitary genius. Salter noticing that the planted scarf has not burned at its edges, Tripp pursuing the abandoned trolley and both of them questioning Professor Harris are more convincing to me than some of Callanach's grander flashes of intuition.

Ava is better at that human part of the job from the start. She can challenge Callanach without making every disagreement into a contest, and she also sees through Professor Harris's certainty earlier than most. Harris is the retired profiler brought in after Jayne Magee is presumed murdered. He decides the killer is a chaotic sexual offender who cannot sustain employment or relationships, largely because that is the offender he expects to find. The actual Reginald King is a university administrator with a job, routines, immaculate shoes, lists and an extraordinary capacity to plan. He scouts locations, arranges cars through an intermediary, rents a lock-up without meeting the owner, chooses victims after watching them and intentionally plants evidence. Watching Harris turn assumptions into conclusions is maddening, particularly when Rory Hand, a convicted sex offender, is hauled in and eventually confesses to murders he did not commit. Callanach sees Hand's surprise when the crime photographs are shown to him, but Harris interprets virtually every response as confirmation of his theory. This is one of the book's better themes because it is practical rather than abstract. Once an impressive person has supplied a confident explanation, everybody starts arranging the work around it. DS Lively wants Harris to be right partly because of his emotional connection to Jayne's church, the Chief tolerates him partly because the church is paying, and inconvenient contrary details become things to explain away. I believed that organisational dynamic even when I was less convinced by the precise police procedures surrounding it.

King himself is more difficult. He is revolting by design, and there is no ambiguity about what he does. He removes Elaine's teeth, tortures her feet with a ruler, forces her to watch her own memorial service and later abducts Jayne. Grace, one of the women he intends to use as a corpse substitute, has teeth pulled with pliers before King kills her by forcing chess pieces into her throat. Near the end, fourteen-year-old Billie is suspended upside down before he cuts her throat in front of Ava and Natasha Forge. I do not object to a crime novel being grim, but there is a point at which repeated access to King's thoughts stopped adding much. His vanity, misogyny, resentment of educated women, obsession with being recognised as intellectually superior and habit of converting cruelty into ‘education’ are established very thoroughly. Then they are established again. The irony of an administrator who thinks administrative work is beneath his intellectual gifts also interested me initially, particularly his fury at routine HR requirements and at Professor Forge giving him ordinary tasks. Yet he becomes so comprehensively awful that there is little left to discover about him except what particular form the next act of violence will take. Readers who want prolonged scenes from a sadistic killer's perspective should know that the book supplies plenty. Readers who find that material exhausting rather than suspenseful may struggle, because it is not confined to a couple of brief chapters.

The character relationship that carries the middle for me is therefore Callanach and Ava. It develops through meals, drinks, an old film, arguments and work rather than being switched on because the plot requires immediate romance. Ava taking him to see Ice Cold in Alex, then handling an aggressive drunk in a pub without needing Callanach to rescue her, tells me more about her than pages of description would. Their friendship also exposes the weaker sides of Callanach without reducing him to them. His history in France is substantial: Astrid Borde accused him of rape after a disastrous date, the evidence looked sufficiently convincing for him to be charged, she withdrew before trial, and his career and relationship with his mother were still wrecked by the allegation. Later Astrid turns up working in the same Police Scotland building, having followed him to Edinburgh. That coincidence pushed my patience. Her subsequent role is even larger because she has been stalking Callanach, sends the expensive champagne and roses originally assumed to concern Ava, witnesses Ava's abduction through binoculars and withholds the information until she can bargain for access to Callanach. It certainly creates pressure, but by this stage the novel already has a serial abductor, a false confession, a compromised profiler and another substantial investigation running alongside the main one. Astrid's arrival feels less like deepening Callanach and more like adding another crisis because one crisis is apparently insufficient.

That second investigation is my biggest structural reservation. Ava investigates newborn babies left in a park and traces surviving baby DNA apparently to fourteen-year-old Lucy Costello, only to discover the blood actually belongs to Lucy's identical twin Felicity. Felicity has been sent to St Gerard Majella's, a concealed school for pregnant girls where Sister Ernestine prevents access to abortion, confiscates phones and physically beats pupils. Felicity eventually explains that two other girls made a pact with her to abandon their babies in order to expose what was happening. One, Sarah Butler, says she was raped by a priest; another, Rebecca, is traumatised and self-harming. There are powerful individual moments here, especially Felicity asking to see the baby she had made sure was wrapped warmly enough to survive, and her refusal to return to parents who knowingly left her in an abusive institution. I also liked Callanach's careful recognition that getting information from her is not the same thing as helping her. But the storyline expands into a sweeping confrontation with the Roman Catholic Church, culminating in Ava's press statement comparing the school with the Inquisition and her suspension. It began as an affecting case about frightened girls and institutional power, then grew so large that I felt I had wandered into a second novel. The strongest material is Felicity herself. The wider public controversy is noisier and less convincing.

There are credibility problems elsewhere that matter more because the main investigation asks me to admire precision. Callanach steals personal objects from the supposed victims' homes and keeps them near his bed as a sort of private shrine. He uses a fake phone call to escape Harris's briefing. He enters Ava's home in the middle of the night after her abduction, searches her private bedroom and punches her wall. Most alarmingly, when Elaine finally has a hammer over the incapacitated King, Callanach silently signals that she may have one blow. She duly smashes King in the mouth. I understand the emotional satisfaction the scene is designed to provide after everything King has done, and Elaine deliberately avoids killing him. I still did not like a senior police officer privately authorising revenge violence and then planning an innocent explanation for it. The book frequently presents Callanach's disregard for boundaries as evidence of how deeply he cares. Sometimes I saw care. Sometimes I saw a man who badly needs to stop deciding that his feelings exempt him from the rules he applies to everybody else. Ava telling him near the end to ‘get over yourself’ when he tries to take responsibility for her abduction was therefore quite satisfying. She is capable of owning her own bad decisions without needing him to make them part of his guilt.

The final solution does, however, make good use of details that have been sitting in view. Callanach eventually recognises that the burned corpse cannot actually be proved to be Elaine once he stops treating King's planted blood, tooth, scarf and altered bones as independent evidence. Jayne's remains present the same problem because her extracted teeth have been added separately to a substitute body dissolving in sodium hydroxide. The crucial linguistic misunderstanding is pleasing too: the cyclist who heard King muttering ‘the lane’ probably heard ‘Elaine’, as in taking Jayne back to Elaine, while the remembered number twelve relates to the journey. Natasha then supplies the connection that King attended public talks given by both Elaine and Jayne and later saw Ava lecture. This is the investigation finally doing what it should have done earlier, looking at how the offender selected and researched his victims rather than following the material he chose to leave. By the time Callanach and Natasha find King's house, discover the hidden parallel staircase and hear screaming behind the locked door, I was properly invested again. The rescue is melodramatic, particularly Callanach arriving with a taser passed up by Tripp, but after the false turns it provides a reasonably coherent payoff.

So my recommendation depends very much on what you want from a crime thriller. If you like long, graphic serial-killer novels, want substantial time with both offender and police, and are happy for personal lives, side investigations and workplace conflict to occupy nearly as much space as forensic detection, I can see this keeping you up for several evenings. There is plenty happening, and Ava is a strong enough character that I would willingly read another investigation involving her. If your pleasure in a procedural comes from disciplined police work, economical plotting and investigators who cannot simply bend rules whenever the emotion is high enough, I would be more cautious. I finished because I wanted Ava out of King's room, Elaine and Jayne found alive, and Harris proved wrong. All three gave me reasons to continue. I also finished thinking the book would have been stronger with fewer ordeals, less time listening to King explain himself and considerably more trust in the characters who were already doing the useful work.