There’s something about rapid-fire writing and the relentless staccato of short, sharp sentences spiced with dark wit, grim insight and bloody shockers that keep a reader focused and flipping pages as the narrative rocks along.

Bryce Main, a Scottish adman of a certain vintage and author of the debut crime novel, A TIME FOR DYING, might say: It’s the dog’s bollocks.

And Main shows himself to be a past master at delivering such snappy, driving narrative about a unique team of six sleuths assembled to track down a relentlessly punctual serial killer dubbed The Holy Ghost, who always serves up fresh victims on August 1 of the year he chooses to kill again.

And again. Six victims so far and the promise of a seventh. All killed with the original model of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife issued to elite Allied combat units, including British and Canadian commandos and paratroopers, U.S. Marine Raiders and agents of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.

After repeatedly stabbing each in the chest, piercing their hearts just like the knife was designed to do, the killer plunges the blade through the top of each victim’s head. A grisly and unique calling card. Heavy with historic symbolism the team must figure out. Just one of a myriad of puzzles the killer leaves behind to frustrate and confuse.

While there’s enough gristle and gore sprayed about and a scene or two of frenzied street pursuit, most of the action takes place in an underground war room underneath Winfield House, home of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

This ultra-secure location comes complete with a sophisticated, artificial intelligence driven supercomputer dubbed Mother, which is capable of recognizing each team member by name and engaging them in realistic human dialogue.

Old hat, right? A yawner, even for geeks and nerds. Not in the hands of this author, who makes Mother an integral part of a team that includes a Jesuit priest, a crippled and guilt-ridden Scottish special ops type and a Cherokee manhunter who specializes in tracking down serial killers and was once a member of the Shadow Wolves, a special unit of Native American trackers who pursue drug smugglers hiking across the desert wasteland of the Tohono O’odham tribal reservation, which straddles the border between Mexico and Arizona.

A mix like that makes for a yeasty team dynamic between folks who are super-smart, unconventional in their thinking and not shy about saying what’s on their mind. This results in sharp, sometimes spiky dialogue that spices up the main action in this book, which is cerebral, featuring the 3D mental chess between the team and The Ghost and a chase that leads across prime numbers, cryptic letter messages mailed to the cops for every victim and precious royal jewels that symbolize the might and power of the British Empire.

In Main’s hands, this mental pursuit is as exciting as the car chase in Steve McQueen’s Bullitt — and just as visceral and smashingly real. Takes a damn good storyteller to pull that off, a guy who knows his way around words and pace and plot twists, character development and crackling dialogue, too. And salty slang.

Pick up a copy of A Time For Dying. It’s the dog’s bollocks.