An explosion, on Remembrance Sunday. The culprit: an elderly man, a veteran, wearing a suicide vest. Scottish nationalism, the treatment of veterans and policing in Scotland are the drivers of this narrative.

This story hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. It’s a while since I read Wilderness, the first in Campbell Hart’s series about Glasgow detective John Arbogast. The Nationalist was just the tonic after a tiring week, I needed to relax into a book which moved fast and didn’t demand much from me. This took me for a ride and finishes at a sprint as the end game approaches. Right up until the end, I didn’t know how it would finish.

Arbogast is at times an unsympathetic character, his relationship with Rose, DCI Rosalind Ying, gets complicated and he retreats to alcohol. This gets him into trouble, trouble he cannot have foreseen would link him to the Remembrance Sunday terrorist attack. As pieces are pulled together, Hart keeps the mystery going until the end whilst weaving in the complicated politics in Scottish policing, resentments, ambition and dislike.

Visit Campbell Hart’s website.
Read my review of Wilderness, the first Arbogast book.
3^rd in the Arbogast series, Referendum, will be reviewed here soon.

If you like ‘The Nationalist’, try these other crime novels:-
‘Due Diligence’ by DJ Harrison
‘No Other Darkness’ by Sarah Hilary
‘Dead Simple’ by Peter James

‘The Nationalist’ by Campbell Hart, #2Arbogast [UK: Campbell Hart] Buy at Amazon

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
THE NATIONALIST by @elharto http://wp.me/p5gEM4-21L #bookreview via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-21L