The Night the Rich Men Burned

De: Malcolm Mackay

Narrado por: Angus King

Longlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger for Best Thriller 2015.

There's nothing so terrifying as money . . .

Two friends, Alex Glass and Oliver Peterkinney, look for work and for escape from their lives spent growing up on Glasgow's most desperate fringes. Soon they will become involved in one of the city's darkest and most dangerous trades. But while one rises quickly up the ranks, the other will fall prey to the industry's addictive lifestyle and ever-spiralling debts.

Meanwhile, the three most powerful rivals in the business – Marty Jones, ruthless pimp; Potty Cruickshank, member of the old guard; and Billy Patterson, brutal newcomer – vie for prominence. And now Peterkinney, young and darkly ambitious, is beginning to make himself known . . .

Before long, violence will spill out onto the streets, as those at the top make deadly attempts to out-manoeuvre one another for a bigger share of the spoils. Peterkinney and Glass will find themselves at the very centre of this war; and as the pressure builds, each will find their actions – and inactions – coming back to haunt them. But it is those they love who will suffer most . . .

From the award-winning author of the Glasgow Trilogy, The Night the Rich Men Burned is a novel for our times, and Malcolm Mackay's most ambitious work to date.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Malcolm Mackay's writing rings true . . . [he] is quite unlike the general run of writers of Tartan Noir. Indeed he is quite unlike most crime writers . . . He writes with authority, and this is what makes his novels compelling . . . Mackay's underworld is convincing . . . Mackay writes with such assurance that he makes it credible . . . Mackay's achievement is to have created a credible world of his own . . . He is a very unusual writer, one who skilfully gives the impression that he is without illusions about how people think and act.

For his Glasgow trilogy, Malcolm Mackay accumulated praise and awards rarely accorded to a new crime writer, all the more astonishing for an author who has rarely ventured into the city that he describes with such vigour. Can he keep it up? His fourth novel, The Night the Rich Men Burned, says yes. Different characters and more intricate storylines than the books of the trilogy, but recognisably the same terrain. Mackay has created his own world of Glasgow gangsterism, and within it two friends try to set up an empire of debt collectors that is not to the liking of the existing operators.

Hailed as the rising star of Tartan Noir, this is Mackay's much anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Glasgow Trilogy . . . Mackay captures the helplessness of a recession-ravaged industrial city.

Malcolm Mackay has only been a published crime writer since June last year but his Glasgow Trilogy attracted the sort of acclaim normally reserved for far more experienced novelists. Fans of the trilogy will be relieved to know that The Night the Rich Men Burned - Mackay's fourth novel and the first to stand alone - does not stray far from the already tried and tested formula . . . [It is] a fast-paced read, combining an enjoyably voyeuristic insight to the violent world of these gangsters with enough of a focus on their lives and motivations to make them if not likeable at least understandable. Mackay's description of his chosen setting is superb . . . the characters are well thought out and believable . . . the huge number of fans Malcolm Mackay has garnered since his first release 14 months ago is unlikely to be disappointed.

Failure on many counts

(This review applies not only to the current book but also to the other four, very similar, books by Mr Mackay that have been published over a very short span of time.)

As far as the writing is concerned, there are many events that occur among a large cast of characters, but little in the way of cohesion or plot. Things just happen, and then the next thing happens, and so on. There is absolutely no suspense or tension, which I think ought to be crucial in a successful crime novel. The characters are very bland, superficially described, and difficult to differentiate. The story shows little sense of time -- it takes almost to the end of the book to find out how much time passed between the beginning and the end. More egregiously lacking is even a remote sense of place. If you read Ian Rankin, you always know you're in Edinburgh; Adrian McKinty takes you to Belfast, and you know you're in Louisiana when you read James Lee Burke's Robicheau's novels. The current book could have been set anywhere, but unfortunately goes nowhere.

The reading is equally bad. The narrator has no idea of pacing. He lacks the ability to make voices not sound like caricatures. Finally he mangles nearly every sentence by putting emphasis on the wrong word, thus altering and sometimes destroying its meaning. I constantly found myself mentally rereading a sentence to try and capture what I think the author meant to write.

I persevered through this and the other four Mackay novels in hopes of better, but in the end I was sadly disappointed.