Bobby March Will Live Forever

Mysterious Book Report No. 441

by John Dwaine McKenna

A heatwave in Glasgow, Scotland during the summer of 1973 is the setting for Edgar Award finalist Alan Parks’s third crime novel featuring a troubled, hard-drinking and morally challenged  . . . yet brilliant police detective named Harry McCoy.

Bobby March Will Live Forever, (World Noir, PB, $17.00, 320 pages, ISBN 978-1-60945-685-6) finds McCoy tasked with resolving the circumstances of the overdose death of a rock star named Bobby March in a local hotel room . . . while a less competent but better connected peer is put in charge of finding a little girl who’s been abducted and possibly murdered.  It’s a case that has the city on edge and the public demanding answers as the days pass, the heat wave continues with no relief in sight and no answers about the missing child.  When the case is botched and an innocent, developmentally, disabled man is wrongfully accused of the crime . . . tempers reach the boiling point and Harry McCoy is put in charge in an effort to save face.

In the meantime, between the overdose and the abduction, McCoy is asked to covertly locate the police chief’s missing fifteen year old niece, who may be living with an up-and-coming drug-dealing young thug, who’s a promising gangster wannabe and probable killer.

The simultaneous searches grind on through the heat, abject poverty and unending serial violence in this outstanding Scottish Noir thriller and build to a powerful conclusion that will have readers looking for the next installment of the antihero detective named Harry McCoy.  Author Alan Parks has a knack for description and an ear for dialect that will leave you almost sweating from the heat, hearing the sounds of the city and smelling the smoke from the dope being smoked, as well as the incense being burnt to cover it up!

 

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