The Heretic

Author/Guide: Liam McIlvanney

Why a Booktrail?

1975: A deadly fire. A brutal murder. A catastrophic explosion.

ISBN: B0824SJWBW
Genre: Crime

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What you need to know before your trail

An arson attack on a Glasgow warehouse causes the deaths of a young mother and child.

Police suspect it’s the latest act in a brutal gang warfare that’s tearing the city apart – one that DI Duncan McCormack has been tasked with stopping.Five years ago he was walking on water as the cop who tracked down a notorious serial killer. But he made powerful enemies and when a mutilated body is found in a Tradeston slum, McCormack is assigned a case that no one wants. The dead man is wearing a masonic ring, though, and Duncan realizes the victim is not the down-and-out his boss had first assumed.

As McCormack looks into both crimes, the investigations are disrupted by a shocking event.
A bomb rips through a pub packed with people – and a cop is killed in the blast. The cases are stacking up and with one of his own unit now dead, McCormack is in the firing line.

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Travel Guide

Glasgow 1975

The view from Gardner Street

The view. The best view in the city, the view that made the run worthwhile. The sandstone canyon of Gardner Street dropped away like a ski-jump. The city’s steepest street. Down at the foot of the hill was the early traffic on Dumbarton Road. If you raised your eyes, you could see the river and the cranes and the green hills of Ayshire down to the south.

Temple Road Police station

They were heading to Temple Police Station through the landscaoe of a Second World War newsreel. The dustcart drivers’s trike was entering its foruth week. Bags of Rubbish lined the pavements, pecked at by hovering gulls.Broken porams, discarded fridges, cardboard boxes in tottering columns. The mounds were five or six feet high iun places, turning the poavements into secret alletways, cutting off sunlight to the ground-floor flats.”