The book
Winner of the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original
The third dark and gripping Harry McCoy thriller from the most exciting new voice in Scottish noir.
July 1973. The Glasgow drug trade is booming and Bobby March, homegrown rock hero, has overdosed in a downtown hotel. Alice Kelly, meanwhile, is thirteen years old, alone, and missing. Harry McCoy is quietly asked to find his boss’s niece, who’s fallen in with a dodgy crowd and hasn’t been seen for days.
McCoy has a hunch that there’s a connection between all three events, but the clock is running, the papers are out for blood, and the department wants results.
Alan Parks worked in the music business for decades and his familiarity with the industry together with his intimate knowledge of the deeply noir 1970s Glasgow—its music scene, hard men, political infighting, class divisions—make this a pitch-perfect installment in the lauded Harry McCoy series.
The author
Alan Parks
Before beginning his writing career, Alan Parks was Creative Director at London Records and Warner Music, where he marketed and managed artists including All Saints, New Order, The Streets, Gnarls Barkley, and Cee Lo Green. His love of music, musician lore, and even the industry, comes through in his prize-winning mysteries, which are saturated with the atmosphere of the 1970s music scene, grubby and drug-addled as it often was. Parks’ debut novel, Bloody January, propelled him onto the international literary crime fiction circuit and won him praise, prizes, and success with readers. The second book in the Harry McCoy series, February’s Son, was a finalist for a MWA Edgar Award. Parks was born in Scotland, earned an M.A. in Moral Philosophy from the University of Glasgow, and still lives and works in the city he so vividly depicts in his Harry McCoy thrillers.