Exit Wounds by Neil Broadfoot review: 'gallops along'

It may feel a little improbable at times, but Neil Broadfoot's well-plotted new thriller moves so quickly it’s never too difficult to suspend your disbelief, writes Allan Massie

Exit Wounds begins in Belfast. The Troubles are long over, but the province is still troubled. Connor Fraser, ex-RUC, now living in Scotland, is back there for the funeral of his boyhood friend Danny, a psychologist who had lived for many years in London, but who was killed on a return to Northern Ireland in what seems to have been a car accident.

At the funeral, Danny's mother gives Connor two things which she says Danny would have wanted him to have: a fine gold watch with inscriptions and a prayer book. This is a bit puzzling. But, more puzzling still, at the funeral Connor recognizes three hard men, notorious in the bad old days.

Neil Broadfoot's new Connor Fraser novel, Exit Wounds, begins in Belfast | Getty Images

He has already experienced a bad day since his return, when, trapped by villains in an alley, he recognized their leader and dealt with them all with brutal effectiveness. So, something strange is going on, and Connor is in danger.

He calls Simon, an old colleague from his days in the RUC, now living in Stirling and working for a security firm. With barely credible efficiency, Simon organizes a safe house for him in Belfast, well stocked and with a number of burner phones, essential in any crime novel of this sort today.

When I add that Connor is estranged from his partner Jan, who has inherited a very dodgy transport business from her late father, and that he also has a beloved grandmother suffering from dementia and living in a care home near Stirling, you will understand that, while he may behave like a violent thug at times, he also has fierce loyalties and a heart of something like gold. That's to say, he's a Tartan Noir hero straight from Central Casting.

Broadfoot, a former journalist who worked for The Scotsman for many years, has a high reputation. Ian Rankin, with characteristic generosity, hailed him some books back as a "rising star". His books have also been compared to the Jack Reacher novels, a high recommendation if - unlike me - you delight in self-righteous violence and cold-blooded killing in the name of good. Still, fair enough, and Broadfoot undoubtedly handles this sort of stuff with verve and authority. As Muriel Spark used to say with characteristic asperity, "for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like."

Broadfoot manages his complicated plot - and the sub-plot concerning Jen - with gusto and authority. Some of it is predictable. As soon as you learn that the late Danny's father was a British colonel in the years of the Troubles and what followed, you will realise the direction things might be heading in. It is all done adroitly, although tiresomely - for readers of my generation at least - much of the ability of one of Connor's junior colleagues to explore the dark history of these years is down to his mastery of the internet. For veteran lovers of crime fiction this tends to seem too easy, a bit like cheating indeed. No doubt this is a foolish reaction, but there it is; I can't imagine Maigret, Laidlaw or Philip Marlowe relying on such tools. That said, it would, I suppose, be strange if crime novelists today did not make use of all the many aids to investigation now available.

In short, though this isn't my sort of crime fiction, I can nevertheless see that it is a more than competent, sometimes rather good, example of the genre. I may wish that there was less gratuitous and sometimes highly improbable violence, but I can still admire Broadfoot's vigour and his ability to make what often seems a scarcely credible plot come together. Exit Wounds gallops along, and moves fast enough to enable the reader to suspend the disbelief it invites.

Exit Wounds, Neil Broadfoot, Constable, £21.99