Book review: Thirty-One Bones, by Morgan Cry

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dead, seemingly from a heart attack – and with her death, all the money raked in through the scam vanishes as Effie had withdrawn it all in cash and hidden it.

Just because someone has died, however, it doesn’t follow that all their debts are forgiven so now it’s Effie’s estranged daughter, Daniella, who is on the hook for the money.

In town for the funeral, Daniella is confronted by a group of ex-pats who had been relying on the money Effie said she was going to make through her scam. With the money gone, the ex-pats are ready to throw Daniella to the wolves if she can’t come up with the cash – then a terrifying enforcer catches wind that the money is missing.

With threats coming from all sides and a near impossible deadline to meet, Daniella is a stranger in town with no-one to turn to. And as if she didn’t already have enough going on in her life, she also has a Spanish detective, Captain Lozano, investigating her mother’s death, as he thinks there’s a little more to the situation than a simple heart attack and is convinced that Daniella knows more than she’s letting on.

Peppered throughout the book are transcripts from interviews conducted by Lozano, which give the reader an insight both into the investigation and into the personalities of the characters being interviewed, adding an extra dimension to them.Brown may have left behind the dark alleyways of tartan noir for the hot streets of Spain, but he proves that it can be just as dangerous out in the sun, and that he can still make his readers sweat.

Thirty-One Bones, by Morgan Cry, Polygon, £8.99

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