Bloody January (A Harry McCoy Thriller)

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No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. The Kremlin leadership tried hard to keep the outside world and the population inside Azerbaijan unaware of the intervention, but Mirza Khazar and his staff foiled this attempt. He pretends to be a cop, but he moves between the two worlds without deciding on either and spends all day drinking in filthy dens.

In a helter-skelter tale - winding from moneyed elite to hipster music groupies to the brutal gangs of the urban wasteland - Bloody January brings to life the dark underbelly of 1970s Glasgow and establishes Alan Parks as a new and exciting voice in Scottish noir. He’s an interesting lead… he certainly has his foibles – frequents a prostitute who works for a local crime boss (also Harry’s childhood friend) and happily partakes in a joint or two and drinks like a fish. It’s true: when Parks’s Detective Inspector Harry McCoy starts his investigations, they range dizzyingly from lowlife to high, from taking drugs with his prostitute girlfriend to finding out the nefarious deeds perpetrated by an aristocratic shipyard owner. As virtual civil war raged between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, the Kremlin on Monday declared a state of emergency and sent units of the Soviet army, navy and KGB security service to the troubled southern region, where the Kremlin said attempts were being made "to overthrow Soviet power. Yet while McCoy often has to turn a blind eye to whatever Cooper is currently up to, he still has a moral compass of sorts.In a helter-skelter tale – winding from moneyed elite to hipster music groupies to the brutal gangs of the urban wasteland – Bloody January brings to life the dark underbelly of 1970s Glasgow and introduces a dark and electrifying new voice in Scottish noir.

An exciting, evocative first-in-series noir novel set in 1973 Glasgow, a city on the cusp of a heroin epidemic, featuring detective Harry McCoy. Bloody January, Alan Parks’s excellent first novel, propels him into the top class of Scottish noir authors. The soldiers' death toll was claimed by Soviet authorities to have resulted from armed resistance, although some of the soldiers could have been victims of friendly fire. He has a prostitute friend who he sleeps with; and he has another friend who is the head of a local mob organization. According to one report, 93 Azerbaijanis and 29 Soviet soldiers were killed in the street skirmishes.The old one, though, is still in focus: indeed, short of a Tardis, says John Niven, this book is the best way of getting back to Seventies Glasgow. McCoy is rather unconventional in his work, but he certainly has the heart in the right place and fights for justice. From the moneyed elite to groupies, and the brutal gangs of an urban wasteland, Bloody January promises a lot in navigating the underbelly of 1970s Glasgow.