William McIlvanney with Ian Rankin – Dark Remains @RandomTTours @canongatebooks @Beathhigh #WilliamMcIlvanney #DarkRemains #SharonBTB

I’m so thrilled to say I have Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin on my blog today. Thanks to Random Things Tours and Canongate Books for my copy of the book.

In this scorching crime hook-up, number one bestseller Ian Rankin and Scottish crime-writing legend William McIlvanney join forces for the first ever case of DI Laidlaw, Glasgow’s original gritty detective

‘Fantastic’ Lee Child
‘Absolutely brilliant’ Mick Herron

If the truth’s in the shadows, get out of the light . . .

Lawyer Bobby Carter did a lot of work for the wrong type of people. Now he’s dead and it was no accident. He’s left behind his share of enemies, but who dealt the fatal blow?

DC Jack Laidlaw’s reputation precedes him. He’s not a team player, but he’s got a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets. As two Glasgow gangs go to war, Laidlaw needs to find out who got Carter before the whole city explodes.

A prequel to a series that I have never read. William McIlvanny an author I have, weirdly, never heard of before this. The attraction to this book being the magician Sir Ian Rankin. I will put my hands up right now and say he is an author whose books I have pre ordered before now just to get my hands on the next book of Rebus. I don’t know what I expected, Dark Remains was a partly written manuscript of a Laidlaw prequel. Ian Rankin went on to weave William McIlvanny’s words with his own and finish the book.

I am still not too certain if it was a minus or plus point that I had no idea how William McIlvanney’s books were written. I had nothing to compare Dark Remains with, apart from Ian Rankin’s novels.

Set in 1972, Jack Laidlaw is a new transfer to the Glasgow Crime Squad. His new boss DI Milligan has his card marked already, through his reputation. A missing person case turns into a murder case. A lawyer, or fixer, for Cam Colvin a local hard man. The dead man found in an alley down the back of a pub owned by Cam’s rival, John Rhodes. The stakes are high, will this turn into gang wars in Glasgow? Or will Laidlaw and his new partner, DS Lilley, manage to solve this even with his methods not being the norm for policing in the 1970’s?

I raced through this book. Laidlaw is a detective who is an oddity in the force., gritty while at the same time quoting philosophers. He is at his best on the streets, finding answers from the ground up. Refreshing to say the least. I revelled in getting to know him and the other characters throughout the book.

Such an atmospheric setting, Glasgow in the 1970s, dark, moody and so authentic. I obviously don’t know how much of the manuscript Rankin worked from, but it made me think about how well he has adapted his style from Edinburgh and Rebus, to the grittier, more working class Glasgow. I felt like I could have been there, it took me away from the everyday, back to the 1970s with all the negatives that the period brought.

A dark, complex, riveting and twisted thriller. There are red herrings, twists and turns that kept me engrossed all the way. All the way through this book,written by two authors, I couldn’t tell where William McIlvanney ended and Ian Rankin started. Such an expertly seamless story written by two masters of their craft.

Buy Link

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08PL1NMCX/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_SGN4XMS8N2YN1ZB3FE1Q

Author Bio

William McIlvanney’s first novel, Remedy is None, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and with Docherty he won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties, the third in the Detective Laidlaw trilogy, won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. McIlvanney died in December 2015.

Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into thirty-six languages and are bestsellers worldwide. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar Award for Resurrection Men. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Award in the USA, won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull, the Open University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight Review, he also presented his own TV series, Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts. Rankin is a number one bestseller in the UK and has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his wife and two sons.