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About This Book
Stevie McCabe is a private detective in Glasgow, distinguishing himself from the other divorced ex-coppers in his line of work not with any bolt-on character quirks but with a mordant vision that allows him to see events from the first-person-sardonic perspective.
Mired in the world of errant spouses, missing persons fleeing mundane bills, businesses pursuing dishonest staff and petty personal transgressions, something more arresting comes his way when he is asked to investigate the affairs of a local Labour MP. Although he knows his client is lying, a commission that unusual is worth the effort, especially because his unrequited lust for the owner of a jazz club has somehow turned into an asylum appeal for one of her post-Soviet singers and most especially because an old friend he can barely remember is asking him for some pro-bono work investigating the lurid death of his junkie brother……while his ex-wife announces she is taking his children to Australia
Through the peeling tower blocks and smart sandstone tenements of the city, from university to seedy bed and breakfast hotels, McCabe pursues the trails of the dead junkie and the questionable MP, knowing that they should be unconnected, yet knowing, too, that the strict limits of coincidence are being bent and broken by the ways in which the stories intertwine. More worrying still, he is drawn into the orbit of Glasgow's most notorious mobster and a mystery stranger who seems to come from Iraq.
Encountering giant yobs with tiny nicknames, news vendors played by James Cagney, burnt-out hoodlums living in an alcoholic haze and ex-politicians who are corrupt yet tormented by their flaws, McCabe wrestles with his own burdens of past and family as the fabric of conspiracy unravels, with the certainty of more casualties on the way.
Mired in the world of errant spouses, missing persons fleeing mundane bills, businesses pursuing dishonest staff and petty personal transgressions, something more arresting comes his way when he is asked to investigate the affairs of a local Labour MP. Although he knows his client is lying, a commission that unusual is worth the effort, especially because his unrequited lust for the owner of a jazz club has somehow turned into an asylum appeal for one of her post-Soviet singers and most especially because an old friend he can barely remember is asking him for some pro-bono work investigating the lurid death of his junkie brother……while his ex-wife announces she is taking his children to Australia
Through the peeling tower blocks and smart sandstone tenements of the city, from university to seedy bed and breakfast hotels, McCabe pursues the trails of the dead junkie and the questionable MP, knowing that they should be unconnected, yet knowing, too, that the strict limits of coincidence are being bent and broken by the ways in which the stories intertwine. More worrying still, he is drawn into the orbit of Glasgow's most notorious mobster and a mystery stranger who seems to come from Iraq.
Encountering giant yobs with tiny nicknames, news vendors played by James Cagney, burnt-out hoodlums living in an alcoholic haze and ex-politicians who are corrupt yet tormented by their flaws, McCabe wrestles with his own burdens of past and family as the fabric of conspiracy unravels, with the certainty of more casualties on the way.
