Book review: Thirty-One Bones, by Morgan Cry

Morgan Cry, aka Gordon Brown

All is not well among the ex-pat community of the Costa Blanca after a property scam is exposed, in Gordon Brown’s first novel under a new pseudonym

Morgan Cry is the nom de plume of Gordon Brown, one of the founders of the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival, which was established in 2012. The Glasgow-born author has written seven novels and several short stories under his own name, including one featured in Blood on the Bayou, which won the Anthony Award for the best anthology or collection in 2017, but Thirty-One Bones is his first in his new guise.

Set in Spain, Thirty-One Bones concerns the misadventures of ex-pat misfits. First we meet Effie Coulstoun, who is trying to con a naive young man out of 20 grand. It doesn’t take long for her property scam to backfire, but before there’s a chance for her to reap the consequences, Effie drops dead, seemingly from a heart attack – and with her death, all the money raked in through the scam vanishes as Effie had withdrawn it all in cash and hidden it.