Starred review from March 14, 2022
Set in 1974, Edgar finalist Parks’s superb fifth procedural featuring Det. Harry McCoy of the Glasgow Police (after 2021’s The April Dead) finds McCoy just out of hospital after a four-week stay to rest a perforated ulcer. Subsisting on a diet of Pepto-Bismol and alcohol, he fumbles around the edges of a fire-bombing case that killed five women and children in a hairdressing salon. Three young men are charged with the crime. Their subsequent kidnapping from the van driving them to prison raises the stakes. McCoy pulls at loose threads until connections to other murders—and to a longtime gangster friend of his—appear. Throughout the unrelenting violence and the pathos of abject mid-city poverty, Parks keeps the focus on McCoy. Deeply flawed and battered by life, he doggedly persists in the hope things will turn out well for him, though the reader realizes they likely won’t. A Glasgow native, Parks provides a crisp, authentic look and feel to the back alleys, rough neighborhoods, and ramshackle tenements of his hometown. This entry ranks with the best of Ian Rankin and Stuart MacBride. Agent: Isobel Dixon, Blake Friedmann Literary (U.K.).
Starred review from June 1, 2022
Parks, whose Bobby March Will Live Forever (2021) garnered an Edgar for best paperback original, returns with the fifth in his Harry McCoy series, set in 1970s Glasgow. Just released from the hospital, police inspector Harry is nursing his ever-present ulcer with beer, whiskey, and Pepto Bismol. He'll need plenty of all three in the wake of an arson fire at a hairdresser's salon that killed five people. Three teenage boys, arrested for the crime, were abducted from a police van, apparently by vigilantes, and two of them have been found tortured and killed. Will Harry be able to find the third in time? Meanwhile, he's investigating a string of several other, equally grisly murders. It's all too much for a copper who can't stand the sight of blood, but Harry soldiers on, "the ghosts of the dead urging him to find out who'd killed them and why." The more he digs, however, the more walking wounded he encounters, all "battered by life." Noir has long been the dominant color in the palette of such Scottish writers as Ian Rankin and Denise Mina, but Parks manages to find a deeper shade of black, only slightly attenuated by Harry's willingness to go far off the grid to extract a wee bit of justice. A must for those who take their noir straight, no chaser; others should keep the Pepto handy.
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