The case of musicians who turn to literature it is more common than the opposite. It will be that the writers are unable to give a couple of chords with meaning. Or perhaps that the musicians are at the end troubadours with the soul of storytellers who have never gone into literature as we initially indicated but have always been there, between lyrics.
In fact, there are already many cases like Patti Smith, Jo nesbo or the singular Nobel Prize in Literature Bob Dylan... And so we got to a Alan Parks landing in the black genre with the best-selling vitola at the first exchange rate. Nothing better for this than to erect a great character as the one who centralizes his already announced Harry McCoy series.
With his Harry McCoy, Alan leads us through a city in Glasgow adapted to an imaginary dating back to the XNUMXs. A decade that surely accompanied the tender years of childhood and psychedelics of youth. Undoubtedly the best imagined scenario where to awaken the contradictions of light and shadow through which the crime novel moves in its natural habitat.
Top 3 recommended novels of Alan Parks
Sons of February
The typical second part in which the action already takes off without prelude, direct to a frenetic action extended in the form of waves that mix the present and the past, a recent crime and past guilt. Evil is all one and can awaken in the most unexpected way ...
It is not yet dawn on the damp rooftops of Glasgow when the police receive an anonymous call: they have violently murdered a young man on the fourteenth floor of a building under construction. The word "GOODBYE" has been carved into his chest with a knife. That gruesome murder intimately hits a well-known and powerful mobster, Jake Scobie, and, above all, his wayward daughter, Elaine.
Agent Harry McCoy, who has not yet returned to work after the therapy in his previous case, will have to take over the investigation. However, that will not be the only corpse from that cold month of February 1973 when snow mercilessly covers the streets of the city.
Meanwhile, Harry's not-so-rookie colleague Wattie heroically tries to rise to the rank of sergeant. And other shadows emerge from the horizon, denser than the storms that loom over Glasgow: the most dangerous are those that will force our protagonist, McCoy, to return to his tormented adolescence, spent in orphanages and foster homes.
Bloody january
McCoy comes across as an untimely upstart cop. The typical one who arrives to take over the world, with the slogan of complying and enforcing the recently released law, on the verge of a clash with that harsh reality that leads every self-respecting investigator of the sinister and sordid into the most unfathomable recesses of the world and even of the soul.
Glasgow, January 1973. When a young man, almost a teenager, shoots a girl in the middle of a central street and then commits suicide, Detective McCoy is convinced that this is not an isolated act of violence. While dealing with a fellow rookie, McCoy uses his connections to get closer to Glasgow's richest family, the Dunlops, as they take his inquiries there.
In the Dunlop world, there are drugs, sex, incest; Every infamous wish finds fulfillment, at the expense of society's lower echelons, which include McCoy's former best friend at the orphanage, drug lord Stevie Cooper. Harry McCoy's youth, his stubbornness, and his recklessness, which constantly leads him to cross the line of legality, are the only weapons he has to solve his first case.
Bobby March will live forever
Third part of the Harry McCoy series. A fast-paced installment in which there is no time to take a breath. Scattered cases that loom over the already emblematic hero of Parks to stun us with pleasure around an always surprising action.
Glasgow, July 1973. Her name is Alice Kelly, she is thirteen years old, and she has disappeared. It's already been fifteen hours since anyone last saw her. Agent Harry McCoy knows that the chances of a fatal outcome are very high.
Hardly has the police search device been deployed when guitarist Bobby March, the local rock star, suffers an overdose in a hotel; the day before he had performed at a concert at which, in McCoy's judgment, he had not been very brilliant. Be that as it may, the newspapers need bloody news; the police commanders, results; and the law, I respect, whatever the cost. To top it off, the niece of McCoy's boss has been outshone; McCoy will discreetly have to track her down. But can Harry McCoy handle it all?
Other recommended books Alan Parks
death in april
Parks' inexhaustible creative capacity places him at the top of the current noir pyramid with undeniable evocations of the noir genre with more retro overtones. The time and its setting help. But even so, it is always complex to enter a criminal plot by getting rid of current components that can help develop the case and its resolution.
Parks has plenty of arguments to lead us to a XNUMXth century where the criminal on duty could still indulge in killing, even in series, and wait to be found only under the insight of someone like McCoy. Of course, certain scenarios rescued from reality itself help to present such a round final story...
April 1974, Good Friday day. A homemade bomb explodes in a flat in Woodlans, a poor neighborhood in Glasgow. What is a bomb doing there? Is it the IRA? After all, and according to agent Harry McCoy, Glasgow is like Belfast but without the bombs. On the floor they find a corpse (or part of it, since the rest is scattered throughout the dining room).
Someone was building a bomb and it exploded in his hands. In the middle of the investigation, a man approaches McCoy in a pub where they are celebrating with the family of his colleague Wattie, who has just become a father. This stranger, named Andrew Stewart, is a wealthy American whose son (Marine, twenty-two, six months on USS Canopus) has been missing for three days; he is desperate, and after resorting to all official means to no avail, he turns to McCoy for help. This is how the fast-paced fourth installment of the novels starring police officer Harry McCoy begins.
