May God Forgive
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4.7 • 21 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE McILVANNEY PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER 2023
Glasgow is a city in mourning. An arson attack has left five dead. Tempers are frayed and sentiments running high.
When three youths are charged the city goes wild. A crowd gathers outside the courthouse but as the police drive the young men to prison, their van is rammed by a truck, and the men are grabbed and bundled into a car. The next day, the body of one of them is dumped in the city centre. A note has been sent to the newspapers: one down, two to go.
Detective Harry McCoy has twenty-four hours to find the kidnapped boys before they all turn up dead, and it is going to mean taking down some of Glasgow’s most powerful to do it . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
