Hold Your Tongue

Travel Guide

Travel to the dark side of Aberdeen in Hold Your Tongue

Given the title of this police procedural, you should realise the nature of the novel and therefore the nature of the crimes within. Gruesome is not the word. Aberdeen does not come out well in this storyline! It’s well evoked by street names, history of the Granite City and its people etc. But this won’t be on any tourist board websites anytime soon.

“…monstrous steel structures rising from the freezing depths of the North Sea. A nod to Aberdeen’s oil industry. The boom town it had become in the 1970s, with its population almost doubled.

She glanced at the photographs: a reminder of the current struggles in the downturn, the city’s fight to establish itself as a place of learning and new technologies before the day when the oil ran out.

“Aberdeen still boasted the highest number of millionaires in the UK outside of London. Like anywhere the wealth was offset by poverty-stricken areas. The money pouring into the city had brought its fair share of problems: drugs and prostitution, amongst many others. All problems that kept Eve in a job.”