The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter: The Glasgow Trilogy

Malcolm Mackay was born and grew up in Stornoway where he still lives. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, his much lauded debut was the first in the Glasgow Trilogy, set in the city's underworld. It was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award for Best Crime Debut of the Year and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award and was chosen as Best Read by ITV3's Specsavers Crime Thriller Club programme. How A Gunman Says Goodbye, the second book in the series, won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. The final book in the trilogy is The Sudden Arrival of Violence. His other crime novels include For Those Who Know the Ending, Every Night I Dream of Hell and In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide.

"[Mackay's] Glasgow Trilogy is classic . . . The subject is organized crime, but it's the author's blunt eloquence that matters. Don't pick up a Mackay book unless you've got spare time. They're habit-forming."—Janet Maslin,New York Times
"It's been a long time since so many pages went by so fast .... Mackay is a natural storyteller [with] a voice to which we're happy to surrender. Surprisingly rewarding .... a thriller trilogy that thrills. "—Dennis Drabelle,Washington Post
"Exhilarating, canny and strikingly original ... Mackay is less interested in violence than in the insides of his vivid characters' heads, including those of a police detective and the sad-sack victim. Darting seamlessly in and out of those heads, Mackay reveals their thoughts (sometimes dumb, sometimes shrewd) as they jockey for position in a complex power struggle. Remarkable."—Adam Woog,Seattle Times
"Glasgow's a tough city and this is a tough book . . . very authentic, very gritty, you can really feel the streets. They call this genre Tartan Noir and absolutelyThe Necessary Death of Lewis Winteris a first class member of that."—Lee Child
"A quietly absorbing gangland tale, full of moral ambiguities."—The Times
"A welcome, hard-hitting addition to the tartan noir genre . . . It's easy to write a crime novel; it's hard to write a crime novel well. And this unrelenting look at the grimy underbelly of Glasgow's criminal underworld does it very well."—Library Journal(starred)
"Tartan noir fans will be satisfied."—Publishers Weekly
"A remarkably original debut . . . this is a book that it would be hard not to finish in one sitting . . . a wholly believable and unnerving portrait of organised crime."—Observer
"Remarkable. Mackay's achievement is all the more stunning because drawing on his sublime imagination and innate empathy he has created a cast of characters so vivid - especially MacLean, who knows how hard it is to kill a man - that they live on in the memory long after the final page."—Daily Mail