Health studies place the Scots somewhere in the Third World category because of their poor diets, smoking and boozing. Mortality rates aren't the best there, it seems, and Stuart MacBride, an emerging crime novelist, shows why.

		"BLOODSHOT" By Stuart MacBride St. Martins ($24.95)

His Aberdeen cops gorge on bacon, candy, sweet buns, sugary tea and snacks, chain smoke, then pack the pubs for nightly drinking matches. Officer Logan MacRae, demoted in a previous book for messing up, battles daily hangovers while dealing with serial rape, a gory sex killing and an 8-year-old delinquent who kills and maims.

His superiors are two overweight head cases who flog him mercilessly while trying to hog all the credit for his successes. At the same time his "bint," or girlfriend, might be cheating on him.

Luckily, MacBride fills his Aberdeen fun house with hearty, clever and usually profane humor that lightens every chapter. Some is suitable for the family paper:

MacRae chases a suspect "bent double, panting like an old lady at a Tom Jones concert"; illegal pornography is sold to the elderly and the seller's reason, "If I can help spark the flames of their wrinkly ardor, I will"; cops check the bars for a missing soccer star, "the sort of place he could pick up some ... star-struck girlie, go back to her place and practice the offside rule."

"Bloodshot" is too complicated and long for a fast-moving read, but it's also spirited and laugh-out-loud funny in spots.

As Ian Rankin's long-running crime series begins to sound like a leaky bagpipe, Scottish writers such as MacBride arise to take up the kilt-waving in earnest.

Some people have no sense of direction or visual memory of their locations, hence the value of GPS systems.

		"LAST BREATH" By George D. Shuman Simon & Schuster ($24)

George D. Shuman is one of those people. Although his bio says he was "raised on a farm in the Allegheny Mountains" and now lives in the Laurel Highlands, the guy has no clue about either the geography or people of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Granted, he's writing fiction, so he's entitled to make up everything -- and he has been using his imagination to the limit in his Sherry Moore crime series. She's a blind psychic who re-creates the last seconds of dead people's lives by touch, even though bodies have been dead for years. Now, that's imagination.

Shuman envisions a landscape that might be the Laurel Highlands, then proceeds to describe a place that only exists in his word processor. He also invents a virtual reality media that only exists in the minds of those who lack even a basic knowledge of how the press works.

Several observations about Shuman's "sense of place":

Cumberland, Md., is not on Interstate 70, nor is it the home of Allegheny College.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike runs east to west and is not the best route to Sewickley.

The Youghiogheny River does not flow into western Maryland when, in fact, the river begins in West Virginia then heads north into western Maryland and Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Acid, not "sulfates," causes "yellow dog" water around coal mines. (Thanks to Post-Gazette staff writer Larry Walsh for these facts.)

There are too many misstatements to keep going. As for the media, Shuman claims that the press "always" speculates on sexual relationships of elected officials such as his character, Glenn Shiff, attorney general of Maryland who brings Sherry into a murder case.

What the press would really ask is: "What kind of moron would use an alleged psychic to solve crimes?"

Other than those complaints, "Last Breath" is your garden variety, crassly commercial bid to ride the coattails of such TV shows as "Medium" and "Ghost Whisperer."