The stunning conclusion to the Glasgow Trilogy from the celebrated author of The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter and How a Gunman Says Goodbye
Malcolm Mackay was born and grew up in Stornoway where he still lives. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, his much lauded debut was the first in the Glasgow Trilogy, set in the city's underworld. It was followed by How A Gunman Says Goodbye. The Sudden Arrival of Violence is the final book in the series. Follow Malcolm @malcolm_mackay
Superb . . . Mackay is a true original, managing to conjure up a
gripping new way of portraying city-noir. This, from a writer who
has lived his whole life in far-off Stornoway, with only few short
visits to the Glasgow he has so vividly created. He's no longer a
rising star. He's risen
*The Times*
Reviewers often groan at the hyperbole with which publishers adorn
new novels, but with Malcolm Mackay it is justified. His poetic
titles (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter and How a Gunman Says
Goodbye) are infused with the sense of menace that is the sine qua
non of the genre while tipping the wink that this is crime writing
with ambition. The Sudden Arrival of Violence is the conclusion to
Mackay's acclaimed Glasgow trilogy . . . The youthful Mackay has
the command of a writer twice his age, and he has delivered a
conclusion to his trilogy that is just as cohesive and forceful as
his previous two books.
*Financial Times*
The final novel in Malcolm MacKay's wonderful Glasgow trilogy . . .
Gripping and vivid, with a labyrinthine plot involving double - and
triple-crossing, The Sudden Arrival of Violence is told in a
staccato, abbreviated style throughout. It's very difficult to keep
this up, let alone do it well, but MacKay succeeds magnificently,
and his third novel is well up to the high standard of its
predecessors
*Guardian*
This is a story to take in one gulp . . . Malcolm Mackay's lauded
Glasgow Trilogy pounds a familiar beat - fans of Taggart and
William McIlvanney's Laidlaw will know it well - the Glasgow
backbeat of chisel-faced hard men, organised crime, vengeance,
punishment beatings, vicious killing . . . As you'd expect from a
writer whose previous books have been listed for - and won - major
crime fiction prizes, the prose is as terse as the tale is tense .
. . Mackay grabs the action from the start . . . He completely
commands his material as he steers it towards a dramatic
culmination.
*Scotsman*
It's a virtually unanimous verdict. Few new novelists have enjoyed
such comprehensive acclaim in the critical fraternity as the young
Scottish crime writer Malcolm Mackay. His books, the first of which
was 2013's The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, suggest a Scottish
equivalent of the hardboiled James M Cain; a writer who doesn't
waste a word and who nourishes a certain poetic sensibility - as
evinced by the titles of the other two books in his trilogy, How a
Gunman Says Goodbye and now this acerbic final volume, The Sudden
Arrival of Violence. Every debut in the crime fiction field is
inevitably (and wearingly) trumpeted by its publisher, though many
such books fall by the wayside. But this is a writer who justified
the publisher's hyperbole and has had critics attempting to come up
with new adjectives to praise him. The Necessary Death of Lewis
Winter places the reader uneasily in the mind of a hitman. Using
the familiar trappings of the crime novel, the book was still
utterly original. What makes all three novels in the now-completed
trilogy particularly impressive is the terrifyingly laidback,
authentic toughness - surprising, coming from an unassuming
30-year-old author from Stornoway (where he still lives) in the
Outer Hebrides. Mackay has conjured and brilliantly sustained
throughout his three novels an astringent vision of the Scottish
underworld. Crucially, he has not forgotten the importance of pithy
characterisation. In The Sudden Arrival of Violence, the author
draws a variety of strands together, but not in a too schematic
fashion. Calum MacLean is a hitman working for two criminal bosses.
He is always watching, alert for the weaknesses that will give him
an advantage. But as Calum begins to arrange his retirement, a gang
war breaks out between one of his bosses and a bitter rival, and
inevitably the gunman is drawn into the bloodiest of showdowns. I
hadn't the slightest doubt that Mackay - whose youth belies a crime
novelist of worldly authority - would pull off this concluding
volume with the kind of understated panache that distinguished its
predecessors ... and so it has proved.
*Independent on Sunday*
Dangerously original.
*Saga Magazine*
Mackay's clipped, spare, present tense narrative is urgent, clever
and ominous. In a field so crowded as crime writing it is not easy
to present an original voice. Malcolm Mackay's laconic tone is his
alone . . . the Herbrides have produced an author of their own who
strides easily into the top division.
*West Highland Free Press*
Brutal but elegantly constructed
*New York Times*
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