Review by New York Times Review
WHERE ARE THE BODIES? That's the pertinent question posed by Michael Koryta in his cool and cunning novel how ? happened (Little, Brown, $27), which is loosely based, he has said, on a murder he covered as a young reporter in Indiana. Perhaps because of the personal angle - or just because Koryta is such a skilled writer - the story feels like the real deal. Rob Barrett, an agent with the Boston division of the F.B.I., is dispatched to Port Hope, Me., to work on an unusual murder case. A 22-year-old woman named Kimberly Crepeaux has graphically described her involvement in a double homicide and someone has to obtain an official confession. More to the point, Barrett must oversee the recovery of the two victims from the pond where Kimberly claims that she and a friend dumped the bodies. "They're down there between the raft and the dock," she explains. "You'll find them there. I don't know how deep. They aren't down there very far, though. It's just dark water, and a lonely place. You'll find them easy." That passage gives me goose bumps, a credit to Koryta's descriptive powers. It doesn't say much, though, for Kimberly's reliability, because despite multiple attempts by professional divers, no bodies can be found in the 24-acre pond. Barrett is something of an authority on interrogation methods, and since he has staked his reputation on his interviews with Kimberly, his job is suddenly in jeopardy. Especially when two bodies turn up 212 miles away, wrapped in garbage bags and stashed in the woods. "The Bureau rarely fires agents," a colleague reassures him, unkindly. "We just bury them." "ON A cold spring day in 1940, the war had come knocking on Reykjavik's door," Arnaldur Indridason gravely informs us in the shadow KILLER (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $26.99), a sober companion to "The Shadow District" and a continuation of the author's close scrutiny of his native Iceland when it was under military occupation. American troops have been sent to relieve the British garrison protecting this neutral nation, and United States counterintelligence agents are already billeted at the old leper hospital. This is no time for a little local murder, if that's all it is when a traveling salesman is shot dead with a Colt .45 pistol, the weapon of choice for American G.I.s. Flovent, the only detective working for the city's Criminal Investigation Department, teams up with a military police officer named Thorson to make what they can of "the implacable hatred, the anger, the utter ruthlessness" reflected in the executionstyle murder. As translated by Victoria Cribb, Indridason's austere, clear-cut prose coldly reveals "all the disruption the military occupation had brought to this sparsely populated island and its simple society." IT'S December of 1923 in Barbara Cleverly's charmingly old-fashioned novel, FALL OF ANGELS (Soho Crime, $26.95), and everyone in England is celebrating in the happy knowledge that World War I is far behind them. Recalling the four Christmases he endured in the trenches of Flanders, Detective Inspector John Redfyre of the Cambridge constabulary is thankful to be spending this one at a holiday concert for organ and trumpet in the company of a more congenial German, Johann Sebastian Bach. Redfyre's pleasure comes to an abrupt end, however, when someone shoves the gifted trumpeter Juno Proudfoot down the steps of the choir loft. She's unharmed, but an attack on another woman that same night proves successful, which puts a chill on the revels. "Was this some upper-class loony loose on the Cambridge streets?" someone wonders. Cleverly resolves the mystery with her customary expertise and good taste. But she's human enough to take the occasional jab at men who make the rules of society, "smothering female talent, gagging and belittling their wives and daughters." Being faithful to the period, she also observes the social proprieties. Inviting a female acquaintance to his cottage, Redfyre worries about decorum. "What he was doing was probably unlawful," he realizes, "and most certainly morally unacceptable." Happily, that doesn't stop him. TIME WAS, every ambitious punk dreamed of making it in New York or London. But according to Malcolm Mackay's gritty novels, the crime capital now is Glasgow. In FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THE ENDING (Mulhoiiand, $26), Martin Sivok ("31, short, stocky and standing in a foreign country") realizes that the criminal contacts he made back in the Czech Republic aren't such big shots here. Unfortunately, the English he acquired watching American TV won't advance his current aspirations, and he's reduced to performing menial jobs for "an absurdly hairy Polish guy" with a better command of the Queen's own English. Mackay himself is a prose master who seems to take real pleasure in assigning a street-smart Pakistani named Usman Kassar to teach Martin the local lingo. It's even more fun watching cocky Usman struggling to pronounce a name like Przemek Krawczyk. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
From Mackay's arch title to his granular examinations of his characters' behaviors and thoughts, it's clear that his approach differs from that of many Scottish crime-fiction authors. As in The Night the Rich Men Burned (2016), Mackay's Glasgow criminals think like businessmen and even see themselves as workers in the crime industry. Nate Colgan, security consultant for the Jamieson organization, is the most frightening man in Glasgow, and he's become de facto head of the organization because the two top gangsters are in jail. He's stressed. He has long focused on variously terrifying, hurting, or killing anyone who threatens the organization. Now, in addition to maiming, he must strategize. Czech gunman Martin Sivok fled Brno's coppers and alighted in Glasgow. Taciturn Martin faces the immigrant's challenge: how to get paid what he knows he's worth. The only lucrative work he finds is teaming up with a flamboyant Pakistani youth whom he doesn't fully trust to be professional. Devotees of crime fiction featuring ravening gangsters and over-the-top violence should exercise patience with Mackay. His Glasgow gangsters are fully fleshed human beings finding their way.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-finalist Mackay's intricate follow-up to 2017's Every Night I Dream of Hell opens with petty crook Martin Sivok, an immigrant from the Czech Republic, tied to a chair in an abandoned Glasgow warehouse. The main narrative reveals what led to Martin's plight. When Martin and his buddy, Usman Kassar, steal £32,000 from a bookie belonging to the Jamieson crime syndicate, Martin, the more cautious of the pair, wants to take his half and lay low, but the flashier Usman is already planning another job. Meanwhile, Nate Colgan, the reluctant acting head of the crime organization during the prison term of Peter Jamieson, the real leader, plans his revenge. Nate must also manage the everyday flow of the business-it's a full-time job keeping the operation on its feet while quietly tracking down two amateurs who had the gall to steal from it. As with all of Mackay's work, the violence is shot through with dark humor, and even the lowest criminals have their fair share of humanity. Tartan noir fans will find plenty to like. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Co. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
That bloke who's escorting you this week may in a week be your boss, or you might be dispatched to kill him. Welcome to the Organization. Martin Sivok desperately wants in. Forced to relocate to Glasgow from the Czech Republic where he'd assembled an impressive résumé as a hit man, he hooks up with a goofy and loud accomplice. Together they manage to rob a bookie's office that turns out to be owned by the Organization. That certainly puts them squarely in the headlights of those players Martin wants to attract, which might not be a good thing. Moral: As the poet says, climbing the greasy ladder is never an easy matter. Verdict "Glasgow Trilogy" author Mackay (winner of both the Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read Award and the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award) delivers another gritty, staccato-told tale that makes the Glasgow underworld seem almost as cutthroat as any boardroom of a Fortune 500 firm. Those who prefer their crime novels as dark as their coffee will delight in this bitter tidbit along the lines of those of Mick Herron and Jake Arnott. [See Prepub Alert, 11/21/17.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
As a captured Czech killer sits bound in a Glasgow warehouse awaiting his fate, Mackay provides a series of flashbacks detailing the events that brought him to such a dire spot.Martin Sivok is good at what he does, but after leaving Brno under some pressure, he doesn't expect the opportunities for new work in a new home to fall into his lap. His drought ends when low-level dealer Usman Kassar invites him to serve as gunman on a routine heist he's researched thoroughly. Unfortunately, Kassar's research has been thorough enough to attract attention, and when he and Sivok break into the bookmaking establishment Donny Gregor runs for jailed crime boss Peter Jamieson (Every Night I Dream of Hell, 2017, etc.), Jamieson security consultant Nate Colgan and his predecessor, Stephen "Gully" Fitzgerald, are also on hand. Miraculously, Sivok and Kassar escape with 32,000 pounds and without killing anybody, and Kassar concludes: "It was a success." But although they haven't left any corpses behind, they've left enough clues to make it much likelier than they'd expected that Colgan and Fitzgerald can trace and identify them. Two months later, the sky still hasn't fallen down around the thieves, and Sivok, pressed to make a down payment on a house for his live-in girlfriend's daughter, reluctantly agrees to Kassar's proposal for a second job. This one doesn't go as fatality-free as the first, and the two thieves survive only because they've succeeded in turning two gangs fighting for control of Glasgow's drug trade against each other. But despite the complete absence of law enforcement personnel (a nice touch), how long can their good luck continue when Kassar is more vulnerable than he realizes and when Sivok's due to end up tied to a chair as the clock ticks down?Dour, dead-eyed, and appropriately disillusioned, though the unfolding is more ritualistic than suspenseful.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
