Book review: February’s Son by Alan Parks

After 20 years in the music business, Alan Parks made his literary debut only last year with Bloody January, but his hard-boiled prose is already providing stiff competition to more established authors in the booming field of Scottish crime fiction.

The sequel to that Grand Prix de Littérature Policière-winning novel, February’s Son is a powerful slab of tartan noir. Set in the Glasgow of 1973, a time of Titbits, Treron’s and thugs with centre-parted long hair and leather coats, it centres on the manhunt for Kevin Connolly, the former enforcer for a crime lord, who has gone rogue and killed the fiancé of his boss’s daughter in a savage moonlit murder on the roof of an office block. The detective tasked with tracking him down is Harry McCoy, who is still recovering from the violent and traumatic climax of Bloody January, which took place only a few weeks earlier.

Connolly is frighteningly strong and perversely sadistic, a psychopath who is totally focused on achieving his aims, and he moves around the city like a ghost while obsessively recording his weight and bagging and tagging his bodily waste. He’s reminiscent of the kind of ritualistic killer only too familiar in these post-Thomas Harris times but transplanted back to an era which lacks the DNA or psychological profiling, the computers or even CCTV that might help track him down. From the outset, the Glasgow police look hopelessly outmatched.

Detective McCoy discovers that Connolly is obsessed with Elaine Scobie, the daughter of gangland boss Jake Scobie, and he and his team have to figure out what his next move will be. Will he now target her father, who controls organised crime in the Northside? Or does he intend to kidnap or kill Elaine herself? McCoy also has to consider whether Connolly is the lone wolf he appears to be. All this would make a compelling enough novel by itself, but there are further dark undercurrents pushing the story in an even more disturbing direction.

All fictional detectives are flawed, but McCoy is more fascinatingly conflicted than most. As a boy, he spent time in children’s homes, where he and other boys were sexually abused by men who are now prominent worthies. The bond he forged with schoolmate Stevie Cooper, who protected him from the worst of the abuse, has endured into adulthood, although they have taken very different paths since then: McCoy into the police force, Cooper into a life of crime. McCoy is quietly proud of his link, through Cooper, with the underworld. But while pursuing a monster, the detective is being consumed by his own demons, leading him to cross lines that even seasoned readers of noir might find disconcerting.

Taking place in a grim and gritty Glasgow, conjured up seemingly effortlessly from Parks’ memory, it’s a riveting book, begging to be read in as few sittings as possible. Even in the continuous torrent of new crime releases, the macabre and morally ambivalent February’s Son is not one that will be quickly or easily forgotten.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT