A gritty graphic procedural. Try this one if you like your novels to be explicit. Muir writes well and it's interesting to read a book set in St Andrews. It's clear that this is not the first book in the series; I was ok with that as the back stories of the various characters, including Gilchrist and Janes, seemed less important than the plot line. It's always hard to review a procedural because of spoilers and that's the case here. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.

Wow, this is an intense entry in this excellent series by Frank Muir. Andy Gilchrist and his team are tasked with finding the killer of an entire family, in which the wife and mother is murdered in a horrific way -- and the author does not spare us the description. This leads to more and more crimes, and a stunning denouement.

The sub-stories identifying the major players in the book will keep you engaged. Muir definitely knows how to write his characters as real people,and you will want to keep reading about them, even as the crimes get worse and the pieces of a terrible puzzle fall into place.

The Meating Room by T.F Muir, is the fifth book in the series that follows DCI Andy Gilchrist.

The novel surrounds a group of detectives, led by Gilchrist as they try and solve, what they initially deem to be a murder-suicide, by a business partner of the wealthy Thomas Magner. As the team investigates, they uncover that Magner is under investigation for a series of rapes thirty years prior and that he is set to go on trial for them. As Gilchrist digs to see how these cases are related, he finds himself closer to uncovering a horrifying secret that has lain dormant for decades.

This is the fifth in a series; some novels can be read alone even when they are part in a series. I feel like this novel cannot. I know that this one was previously published in the UK, but I believe this is the first that will be published in North America. I really struggled to connect with the characters and their backstories. I was able to piece some of it together but had to make a lot of assumptions and inferences on my own. This is at no fault to the author, it is not his fault I dived right into the fifth book!

The novel opens with a bang; a man is found, an apparent suicide, and when the police arrive at his home to question his family, they find them all brutally murdered. I mean BRUTALLY murdered. This will not be for the faint of heart; even I, the lover of all disgusting and brutally described things, found my stomach turning.

After this initial shock, I found the pace to be quite slow but typical for a police procedural type novel. However, the last 30% of this one was like a roller coaster; up and down and as the pace quickened, this one felt like I was racing to the finish line. I was on the edge of my seat as the final bits unfolded.

Overall, I would be open to reading earlier novels in this series and trying to really get to know these characters.