Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
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It’s 1973, and Glasgow is suffering a heatwave. The whole city is in a bad mood and it doesn’t get any better when a thirteen year old girl goes missing. Then, to make matters worse, local boy made good, rock star Bobby March is found dead, in bed, in a second class hotel with a needle in his arm. His career was not what it was, but he was still cock of the walk to pop fans in his home town.
Detective Harry McCoy is in charge of the March case, though he’d rather be joining in the search for the girl, but office politics, and a senior officer who hates him, has left him on the outside.
Then, in the sweltering heat, another teenage girl has done a runner with a known gangster, then he too is found dead. But this time it’s definitely murder. And evidence arrives that maybe makes Bobby’s death not the accident it appeared to be.
I remember Glasgow in the early seventies, and how the polis treated music fans. Heavy handed you might say. Boots and truncheons to the fore, and Parks captures the zeitgeist perfectly.
The guy can write, and as McCoy sweats through those long summer days, following leads from one tenement to another, you can feel the heat coming off the pages. The narrative is interrupted from time to time with flashbacks to Bobby’s time as a pop star in the sixties, and I could have asked for more of them. But that’s just an old man’s fancy. Otherwise, ten out of ten.
