THE Rat Stone Serenade is the fourth DCI Daley novel written by Glasgow-born, Argyll-raised author Denzil Meyrick. His Jim Daley character has been described as “Rebus meets Taggart” but the comparison isn’t entirely apt.

Scottish detectives, at least their on-screen personas, tend to be small in stature, baggy-eyed and riddled with existential angst. Daley, by contrast, is tall “with a great gut hanging over his trousers”. He’s a bit of a stolid character who claims not be inured to grizzly sights but is light on philosophical speculation and doesn’t seem to need the solace of drink, jazz or classic rock, a la Rebus. He does, however, have trouble at home (which contemporary fictional policeman doesn’t?) and the existence of “another woman” is one of the novel’s early revelations.

Rebus and Taggart also operate primarily in urban environments. Daley’s beat is a rural one, subject to sudden outbreaks of extreme violence, and here he has more in common with DI Jimmy Perez from the TV series Shetland, height and periorbital puffiness notwithstanding. Daley operates out of “Kinloch”, but much of the action takes place in the nearby village of Blaan. There, a mansion called Kersivay House overlooks a beach and is surrounded by woods, which provide handy cover for all kinds of shenanigans. In an author’s note, Meyrick reveals that Blaan is a fictionalised version of Southend – originally St Blaan – at the tip of the Kintyre peninsula.

Daley answers to Police Scotland, but the novel’s early scenes are from the past. It opens with the eviction of a blacksmith called Nathaniel Stuart, who has signed over land at Blaan to Archibald Shannon in the naive belief that he will be allowed to remain on it. Shannon wants to build a house and Stuart, who is “of the Tinker community”, curses the Shannon family and promises them a domestic calamity every 50 years “until the end o’ time". Sometime thereafter (presumably 50 years), a child, also called Archie Shannon, disappears from the beach at Blaan.

Kersivay is the house the original Archibald built and it now hosts the Annual General Meeting of Shannon Enterprises, a thriving global concern that has made a fortune on the back of mineral contracts signed with China and Russia. Sundry Shannons arrive at Blaan along with their management team and hired security. They meet in a moil of vendettas and contending agendas, all of it overseen by Ailsa Shannon, family matriarch and mother of the disappeared child.

Meyrick gathers other characters into the mix including Ignatius More, a Church of Scotland minister, who has a passing-strange name for one of that position and an accent straight out of Crocodile Dundee. He also has a younger wife who may have been a nun. There’s a mysterious retainer called Percy, an anxious young woman called Nadia, a wise local writer called Jock Munro and some ancient fishermen with strong Scottish accents who tend to echo the Old Man in Macbeth on the subject of cosmic misalignment. Keeping a watchful eye on everything are Daley, his new boss Chief Superintendent Carrie Symington and his lover, also one of Police Scotland’s finest. On his way to assist is Daley’s old companion Detective Sergeant Brian Scott, who makes up for his boss’s relative sobriety by suffering from delirium tremens. Things that he may or may not be seeing are destined to be an issue.

Scott's progress towards Kinloch is hampered by the fact that it is snowing and conditions eventually close off further access to the area and threaten power supplies. The Gulf Stream would normally militate against this on the far west coast of Scotland, but it’s a neat device for building tension and ensuring that the mayhem that subsequently unfolds is the responsibility of those who are trapped in it. Throw in the discovery of a child’s skeleton laid out on a slab called the Rat Stone, which has druidic and sacrificial associations and the early part of the novel is full of promise and possibilities.

Unfortunately, the transition from augury to action is not a particularly happy one. Dialogue goes flat as Daley is “flung headfirst into a pool of mayhem, murder and horror". The stereotyping that lurked benignly in the accents of the old Scottish characters suddenly jars when it is used to portray Irish and Cockney villains in their accents. Multiple human eviscerations are subject to the law of diminishing shock value. So many people are hit over the head that the action takes on a kind of Stoogean quality. Eventually there are almost as many missing as there are accounted for and, with the best will in the world, it is impossible to worry about all of them.

The denouement is more Agatha Christie than Rebus or Taggart, with the characters who have survived the carnage gathered into the ballroom at Kersivay House. It’s here that the novel belatedly fulfils its early promise with revelations aplenty, many of them unexpected and inventive.

Comparisons are odious, but perhaps DCI Daley would be a more interesting character if he occasionally took time to reflect rather than act, had a pint or listened to a Cure album. Beyond the basic circumstances of his life, we know as little about him at the end as we did at the beginning, and all the violence and mutilation of the day can never quite make up for that.