Clara’s Verdict
Twenty-two books into a series, most crime writers have settled into a comfortable groove and stopped taking risks. JD Kirk has done the opposite here. Better the Devil hands DCI Jack Logan the one development this series has been circling for years, and it is not a new corpse or a new villain. It is Bosco Maximuke, out of prison, walking into Logan’s life and asking for help. That single move is worth more than any amount of escalation, because it forces Logan to work alongside a man he has spent the entire series trying to put away, while that man’s teenage daughter is asleep in his spare room.
This audiobook arrived on 21 July 2026 and is already selling fast enough to place it among the Audible UK bestsellers, which will surprise nobody who follows Scottish crime fiction. Ten hours and fifty-seven minutes with Angus King narrating is close to the ideal shape for this series: long enough for Kirk’s ensemble comedy to breathe, short enough that the investigation never sags. I got through it in three sittings and would happily have done it in one.
About the Audiobook
Better the Devil is the twenty-second book in the DCI Jack Logan series, published in audio by Zertex Crime and running just under eleven hours. The setup is straightforward and very well judged. Bosco Maximuke, a former drug kingpin, is back on the streets after years behind bars, insisting the reform is genuine and set on earning his daughter’s trust back. Then the people who took over his old operation start turning up dead, and suspicion lands on the obvious man.
What lifts this above the standard revenge plot is the geography and the domestic complication. The bodies turn up across a span running from Inverness out to the emptiest corners of the Highlands, which gives Kirk licence to move his team across a landscape that resists policing by sheer scale. Meanwhile Olivia, Bosco’s teenage daughter, now lives under Logan’s roof. Kirk has spent several books building that arrangement, and here he finally collects on it. Logan wants nothing to do with Bosco. Their history, as the listing puts it, is “bloody, bitter, and far from buried.” He does not get a choice, and the pressure that follows pushes the line between justice and revenge somewhere Logan has never allowed it to go before.
On reading order: this is book twenty-two, and while Kirk is good at making each investigation self-contained, the emotional payload here depends entirely on what came before. Bosco is not a new antagonist introduced with a tidy summary. He is a figure with two decades of series history attached, and Olivia’s presence in Logan’s house is the result of a plot that unfolded across earlier volumes. If you have not read the series, this is not the place to begin. If you have, this is the one where the accumulated history finally comes due.
The Narration
Angus King is a Scottish crime specialist and this is precisely the register he was built for. The DCI Logan books live or die on the interplay between procedural grimness and a very particular strain of Highland workplace bickering, and a narrator who can only manage one of those two things will flatten the series into either a misery memoir or a sitcom.
King does neither. He gives the Inverness team distinct voices without turning them into caricatures and, crucially, he lets the jokes land at the speed Kirk wrote them rather than pushing for the laugh. The first listener to write about this recording made the same point, praising narration that brings “the characters to life with distinct voices and perfect comic timing” and noting that King “captures both the darker, emotional moments and the lighter banter”. I would add that his Bosco is a genuinely difficult piece of work: a man performing sincerity while everyone in the room, the listener included, calculates how much of it to believe. King plays the performance rather than the man underneath, which is the correct choice, and it keeps the question open far longer than it would survive on the page.
What Readers Say
This is where I have to be honest about the limits of the evidence. Better the Devil was released on 21 July 2026, and at the time of writing the pool of written responses is very small indeed. The book carries a top rating on the listing, but with so few voices behind it I would not read that as a settled verdict on anything. It is a snapshot from the series faithful who pre-ordered and finished it inside a week.
What that early response does tell us is worth having, because it is specifically about the audio rather than the text. The one substantial review addresses the narration first and the plot second, and singles out the continued development of the regular cast: “Their relationships feel authentic, adding warmth and humour alongside the suspense.” The same reviewer names the balance of “crime, character development and dry Scottish humour” as the quality that sets the series apart, which matches my own experience of it exactly. Give it a month and the rating will have a proper weight of opinion behind it. For now, treat the enthusiasm as real but early.
Who Should Listen?
Existing DCI Logan listeners need no persuading from me. For everyone else: this is Scottish crime fiction of the humane, ensemble-driven school, closer in spirit to a long-running television drama than to a standalone thriller. The violence is real but not lingered over, the humour is dry and constant, and the pleasure lies in watching a team of people who have worked together for years handle something that frightens them.
Skip it if you want a self-contained mystery you can pick up cold, because the central relationship carries twenty-one books of freight and the book makes no apology for that. Skip it also if you have no appetite for the domestic strand, since a significant share of the emotional weight sits with a teenager in Logan’s house rather than with the investigation itself. Anyone who has followed Logan from the beginning will find this among the most consequential entries yet.
