I absolutely loved this. I bought it cheap off a bookbub email mostly because it's set in Edinburgh, where I spent one of the best years of my life. I was expecting a gritty crime novel, and Natural Causes certainly delivers on that front. One thing I really enjoyed about this that I don't often see in police procedurals is that Inspector McLean is just drowning in casework. So he's got not only the most important case, but also a bunch of other seemingly unrelated cases going on at the same time. When the ultimate solution arrives, it's not so much that it was a clever twist I wasn't expecting as that I, like McLean, had a hard time seeing it amongst all the information. Some readers may find this confusing or annoying, but I loved it.

I really wish the publisher hadn't put that first paragraph on the summary because it kills a pretty significant amount of suspense in the story as we don't know whether the events were supernatural or not. To Oswald's credit, I felt that this worked perfectly as both a crime novel and a horror novel, which is something I haven't really seen very often outside of the Joe Pitt Casebooks. Highly recommended to fans of either genre.