Glasgow Novels
2 primary works
Book 1
A mystery, thriller and portrait of a vital city – Glasgow – The Bad Fire is Campbell Armstrong’s finest novel since his unforgettable worldwide bestseller Jig.
Eddie Mallon has grown away from his roots, and away from the city of Glasgow. Eddie was just a child when his family fractured down the middle. He went to America with his mother; his sister Joyce stayed in Glasgow with their father, the charming, violent, mercurial Jackie Mallon.
Now Jackie has been murdered and the son he didn’t know is coming home for the funeral. Try as he might, Eddie cannot resist pushing beyond the bland front presented by the local investigators. And when he does, he finds himself spiralling into the mysteries of the past as well as the present.
The Bad Fire is the place where children are told they will go if they commit a sin. Eddie is about to find out that even after all these years, the fire never goes out.
Lyrical, elegiac, suspenseful and thrilling, The Bad Fire is populated by a cast of superbly drawn individuals, with the city of Glasgow a brilliantly evoked character in its own right.
Book 2
It’s winter in Glasgow, and someone is killing prominent members of the city’s business community in this haunting, atmospheric new thriller from the bestselling author of The Bad Fire and Jig.
Glasgow December, all freezing rains and sleet that bites like schools of piranha. In this city of icy pavements and Christmas street decorations battered by arctic winds, the body of a well-dressed man is found hanging from the girders of a railway bridge…
Investigating the case is Lou Perlman, a detective whose idea of a good suit is anything that fits him. Perlman feels that this is no suicide, and that something about the corpse reminds him of his boyhood in the old Gorbals. Perlman is a man with secrets of his own and, as one death follows another, the hunt for the killer takes him into a territory of deceit and greed – a world of old allegiances that are lethal to reawaken.