Rating: 5/5
Review:
A brilliant conclusion to The Glasgow Trilogy
This is the concluding volume in Malcolm MacKay's excellent Glasgow Trilogy and it maintains the brilliance of the preceding two. It is comprehensible if you haven't read the previous two, but I would strongly recommend beginning with The Necessary Death Of Lewis Winter and How A Gunman Says Goodbye because the story and characters progress through all three to the climax here.
The story is of the Glasgow underworld and how different "organisations" manoeuvre for power between each other and within themselves. As before, we get the points of view of a number of characters which is a difficult trick to pull off but MacKay does it brilliantly, showing the way in which these things play out and the rapid changes in perspectives and loyalties as things change. He is so good at this that, slightly disturbingly, I found myself concerned for a cold-blooded gunman and wanting him to be safe. It's an excellent, exciting and thoughtful story, full of tension and insight and which avoids most of the clichés of the genre.
I find MacKay's style riveting. He writes mainly in short, staccato sentences. Not many adjectives. No similes or metaphors. It moves the action along. Builds the tension, too. You get the idea, and it's fantastically effective, I think. Despite the title, there isn't all that much graphic violence. What violence there is, is described in the same tone as the rest of the book which, to me, makes it exceptionally vivid and disturbing.
I was completely hooked on this as I have been on the previous two books. If you like a good crime novel (this is a lot more than a basic thriller) you'll probably love this and I recommend it very warmly indeed.
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