Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Storm Publishing, and author Andrew James Greig for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

This is the third book in a detective series that takes place in northern Scotland. The main character is Detective Investigator James Corstophine. He has a good crew under him at the small police station, including DC Frankie MacKenzie. At the end of the previous book, The Devil’s Cut, Corstophine was still mourning his late wife, but starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of starting to live again.

When Murder of Crows opens, there’s a sense that something was missed. Corstophine has married one of the side characters from previous stories, Shamila Mallick, a psychologist and profiler. It seems like quite a jump from the character still struggling with moving on from his deceased wife to suddenly being married to someone else. The feeling I had was that Greig had a great idea for a story and fit the characters into it. Unfortunately, if you’re reading the series in order, that feels forced.

The story in Murder of Crows, however, is excellent. What begins with a series of missing scarecrows is initially written off as teenage mischief. The police feel like investigating these is beneath them, although they don’t say it. That is, until one of the scarecrows is returned with a dead body in it. Corstophine is just back from his honeymoon, but he is thrust into what looks like a murder investigation. Since there are several scarecrows that have gone missing, there is a fear that this is not the first body they will find.

All signs point to a former patient of Shamila’s at Carstairs State Hospital. Duncan Lewis murdered his wife and scattered her body parts around Scotland, leaving clues to these locations in a book written by his alter-personality. Shamila was instrumental in declaring him sane once he was properly medicated. When Shamila is abducted from her clinic, Corstophine is afraid that he will be planning a funeral for a spouse once again.

One line gave it away for me early on. I had a hunch, and it turned out to be the case. However, the book was written in such a way that it didn’t spoil the story for me. I couldn’t wait to see how they figured it out. There’s a lot of tension and suspense. Corstophine is taken off the case once Shamila is abducted and outside investigators are brought in. They do a competent job, but they don’t know the people and the area. Frankie keeps Corstophine in the loop, and their knowledge of the area and its people proves to be pivotal.

I really wish this were the fourth book in the series. It felt like there was something missing between Murder of Crows and the previous book. I still liked it quite a bit, though. If you can get past that, the story is really good, if a little gruesome. Greig also doesn’t recount a lot of the earlier character development, so while I think the book can be read without having read the earlier two in the series, I think there’s a lot about the characters that gets missed. There are events taking place around the investigation as well, as even in a small town, murder isn’t the only crime happening. The question becomes how much is related to the murder investigation, and how much is just the usual low-level small-town crime.

I do recommend Murder of Crows. It’s a great thriller and mystery. The characters are interesting, but there are some abrupt changes for people who have been reading the series up until now. I found the events to be very plausible and the investigation to be realistic, as well as what happens in small towns like this.

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