Keep the Midnight Out by Alex Gray

Val Penny ♦ October 30, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

Alex Gray is one of my ‘go to’ authors. I enjoy her DI William Lorimer series of crime novels very much over the years, so when I went to choose a book from my TBR pile recently, I chose Keep the Midnight Out.

The story starts when Lorimer and his wife are on holiday. Lorimer finds the body of a red-haired young man washed up on the shore of the beautiful Isle of Mull. This rather interferes with the Lorimers’ tranquil holiday away from the gritty streets of Glasgow.

The body has been bound with twine in a ghoulishly unnatural position and strongly reminds Lorimer of a murder that was never solved twenty years old in Glasgow. Then he was a newly fledged detective constable and the case has haunted him ever since. Now he is a Detective Superintendent and determined to ensure the connections are made.

As local cop DI Stevie Crozier takes charge of the island murder investigation and Lorimer does try to avoid stepping on her toes. But as the similarities between the young man’s death and his cold case grow more obvious, Lorimer realises that there could be a serial killer on the loose after all these years.

As the action switches between the Mull murder and the Glasgow cold case twenty years earlier, Lorimer tries desperately to catch the cold-hearted killer.

I enjoyed this book, but it was not one of my favourites. I found the idea of identical styles of sadism occurring twenty years apart and never during the intervening period too much of a stretch for me. I thought the likelihood was that the perpetrator would have been drawn to act with more frequency. That said, there were plenty of credible red herrings. If you enjoy a good ‘whodunit’, Keep the Midnight Out is a good read.

The Author

Alex Gray was born and educated in Glasgow. She has been awarded the Scottish Association of Writers’ Constable and Pitlochry trophies for her crime writing and is the co-founder of the Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival. Married with a son and daughter, she lives in Scotland and is currently writing the next book in the Detective Lorimer series.

http://www.alex-gray.com