The Toolpusher

June 2022. A floorhand of twenty-seven is struck on the drill floor of a North Sea platform when a stand of pipe slips from a clamp that was logged as defective at the shift handover. The part was on the next boat. The man in charge of the shift, the toolpusher, is charged with culpable homicide, and the Crown has nothing to prove it with but a few words said in a doorway that no one wrote down.

Elspeth Cardno, who has never been further offshore than the end of a harbour pier, is brought in because the offshore crews will not talk to lawyers, and somebody thinks they might talk to her. She takes a medical, learns to escape from an upside-down helicopter, and flies to a platform west of Shetland to sit down at a table where an empty chair is still set for the dead man.

The crews close ranks round one of their own. A good man is in trouble, and a company in a warm office in Westhill has a date at the bottom of a spreadsheet. Cardno's job is not to decide whether her client is guilty. It is to find out what each witness will really say, and put it on paper without a word of her own in it. This time, doing it straight may cost her more than it costs anybody.

The Toolpusher is the fourth Cardno Precognition novel: a Scottish crime series about the defence side of the courtroom, where the question is not who did it, but whether the Crown's story is true.