The Heretic, Liam McIlvanney's gritty, meaty and propulsive follow-up to The Quaker, finds Detective Duncan McCormack back in Glasgow, heading up a Serious Crime Squad unit after six years with the Met in London. For some of McCormack's Glasgow colleagues, the mystery of why he has returned is as worthy of investigation as something on a police docket.
It's 1975, and McCormack is working full bore to nail Glasgow crime lord Walter Maitland. McCormack is sure Maitland is behind a recent tenement fire that killed four, including a child. But McCormack's boss, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Haddow, wants him to switch gears: the body of an elderly man, a well-heeled local businessman and former politician, has turned up in a rubbish dump. McCormack refuses to sideline the Maitland case. He "marches to his own bloody drum," grouses Haddow, who isn't the only officer to bear a grudge against McCormack for professional fallout from the Quaker case. McCormack cracked that case six years earlier--and it haunts him still.
The Heretic is a hard-charging thriller infused with something not typically associated with tartan noir: tenderness. The novel's scale and roving point of view ensure that all the principal characters' stories can be told and their socioeconomic circumstances fleshed out. When Detective Constable Elizabeth Nicol sums up the "magical strangeness" of her work--"You moved around the city and people opened their doors and gave you little glimpses of their lives"--she could be describing the experience of reading McIlvanney's capacious, immersive novel. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer