There are a few authors for whom I will drop all current reading when their latest book drops. The latest addition to this select list is Alan Parks. His Harry McCoy series has been excellent from the start and continues to get better. The sixth in the series, TO DIE IN JUNE, is no exception. It finds McCoy and Wattie seconded to ‘the shithole of shitholes’ Possil police station, only the former knowing the real reason for their transfer, to expose the corruption centred on the station.It is Glasgow, June 1975. At Possil Police Station, a woman reports her son missing, but there is no trace of the boy, no proof that he even exists. The woman is the wife of the firebrand pastor of The Church of Christ’s suffering, ‘a look in her eyes when she talked about her religion:shining eyes and a conviction that the Lord was on her side and no one else’s.’ Just the thing to get under the Christian brother educated McCoy’s skin.
At the same time, Glasgow’s elderly wino population seems to be decreasing at an unusually high rate, bodies turning up in parks and on the banks of the Clyde, McCoy becoming increasingly concerned with the fate of his down and out father.
As with the previous books in the series, Glasgow is as much a character as McCoy - seedy, dirty, crime ridden - yet the novel is full of dark humour, pathos, social commentary; it is funny, moving and thrilling. Park’s writing gets better and better. It is a lazy comparison to hold the McCoy books up against McIllvanney’s LAIDLAW series but that doesn’t make it inappropriate; the books are that good and can stand alongside the master.
I loved TO DIE IN JUNE and look forward to whatever July brings. I suspect the times the are a’-changin’
