Best known for his Logan McRae series, Stuart MacBride has written a deliciously dark standalone thriller in Birthdays for the Dead. Detective Constable Ash Henderson is investigating the deaths of several girls, abducted just before their 13th birthdays. The murderer finds his victims, tortures them to death on their birthdays, then sends a homemade "birthday card" to their parents each subsequent year. The cards contain pictures of his tortures, progressively worse with each passing year.
Henderson has a secret he keeps to himself, though: his own daughter, Rebecca, is one of the Birthday Boy's victims, and he is determined to exact his revenge on the monster. As such, he straddles the line of good and evil, taking on all shades of gray. Neither easily likable nor detestable, Henderson's complexity challenges readers to empathize with him. A loner by nature--living in a squalid housing development, heavily in debt to a loan shark--he's forced to work with Alice McDonald, a young psychologist, as she compiles a profile of the killer. Her presence softens Henderson's rough edges and adds an element of humor to the otherwise sinister tone of the novel.
Birthdays for the Dead is highly suspenseful, chock full of plot twists. As if watching a scary movie, readers will likely find themselves desperate to look away, but the yearning to see what happens will hold them captive to the very end. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts