Denzil Meyrick

POSSIBLE TRIGGERS: SEVERE, VERY GRAPHIC ACTS of VIOLENCE
It seems that a Glasgow mob boss may have returned from the dead to exact his revenge on those who brought him and his empire down and sent him to prison. The gangster, James Machie, is a nasty specimen of humanity...but was eventually done in by a combination of good old fashion police work and associates who were more than willing to turn evidence in exchange for being placed in the Scottish equivalent of witness protection. When those informers begin turning up as corpses, DCI Jim Daley, whose young partner also had a hand in the case, is confronted with evidence that the person he believed long dead is still alive and kicking. The race is now on to find this resurrected bad guy before he can start to cross off every name on his "folks I want to kill" list. This would be much more believable if the plot here hadn't kept falling over itself. We kept getting explanations of events after the fact, with those explanations often being unclear. The graphic violence, which I was not opposed to in itself, started before I had even read 12 pages...and it is severe with all capital letters, which I was also not necessarily opposed to, but it will diffidently bother a lot of readers, and it goes on way, way too long, without anyone trying to stop it. Perhaps the police had reason to be extra cautious since part of that violence was when a young police officer sees his partner’s head blown apart...BEFORE he actually died. There were also several pages of a man being macheted to death then his bound-and-gagged wife being shown the corpse before her own head is blasted to smithereens. I won't go on any longer... I think everyone gets the picture. I was totally surprised by how graphic these events were and how long they went on, taking up so much of the book. This hasn't happened in any of the other books I have read by this author. It only served to ruin what could have been a good story.… (más)