Unsound

 Heather Critchlow

(Canelo, £9.99)

In creating Cal Lovett, featured here in his third novel, Aberdeen-born Heather Critchlow realised that the adventures of a true-crime podcaster could be just as compelling as those of a detective or a criminal lawyer. Lovett feels just as much commitment to the victims of injustice, and his personal life is just as likely to be screwed up by his vocation. It feels like a refreshing take on an over-familiar genre.

Lovett’s career path was virtually decided for him by the unsolved murder of his older sister, Margot, 40 years earlier. His podcast, Finding Justice, is a personal crusade that consumes most of his time and his thoughts. He feels responsibility for every grieving family he’s helped, and wonders how long he can keep on “taking on the burden of other people’s pain and adding it to his own”, a burden his loved ones can never fully understand.

In that sense, Unsound is something of a perfect storm for Cal. In the Midlands, the man who he believes killed his sister is finally on trial for her murder. Cal hopes it will be cathartic, and that he can finally put her to rest, but the mood is tense and uncertain.

At the same time, the divorced father feels the wrench of having to let go of his 18-year-old daughter, Chrissie, as she starts student life in Edinburgh. Cal’s girlfriend in Aberdeen, Shona, has asked him to move in with her, but even this forensic anthropologist, with her methodical mind and familiarity with criminal investigations, doesn’t quite get Cal, and he can see cracks appearing in their relationship.

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While he’s in Scotland, Shona tells him about a friend’s son, who went to Edinburgh in 2009 and disappeared a few months later, never to be seen again. Cal agrees to look into the cold case, and Critchlow takes us back in time to see how events unfolded for Arran McDonald, from a farming family in Inverness, who went to Edinburgh to study rural resource management in preparation for one day taking over the farm.

A shy country lad, Arran is pleasantly surprised by how well he gets on with his new friends in the halls of residence. With the rich posh boy Jonno as their charismatic figurehead, Arran, Olivia and Colleen have a close, intense friendship for the first term. But when Arran goes back home for Christmas his family feel that he’s changed.

There’s a huge argument, he storms out to head back to Edinburgh and that’s the last they see of him. Could his disappearance have something to do with Danny, the boy from Arran’s school who also went to Edinburgh but dropped out and started dealing drugs? Thirteen years later, the three surviving friends are tight-lipped and no longer so close.

There’s one point at which I felt Critchlow was throwing Cal a bit of a lifeline to help him pull all the pieces of the mystery together, and another when she has an English judge bang a gavel, but those are minor quibbles in a genuinely intriguing, well-plotted story with an emphasis on strong characterisation and relationships, including some particularly good dialogues between Cal and Shona.

She also does well to evoke a very convincing Edinburgh, despite never having lived there. In only his third outing, Cal has amassed quite a bit of backstory, but it’s all set out clearly enough for newcomers to have no fear of jumping in. Though, given how compelling Unsound has turned out, they’re just as likely to order the first two books to catch up properly.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT