The Low Road

July 7, 2014
Glasgow gangster Gerry Dochery is threatening the life of Jimmy McPhee, a childhood friend of newspaper editor John McAllister, in Scott’s talky fifth novel set in the 1950s Scottish Highlands (after 2013’s North Sea Requiem). McAllister, who has deep roots in Glasgow, also knew Dochery as a boy, but neither Dochery nor McPhee is easy to find. In his search, McAllister renews contacts at the Glasgow newspaper where he once worked, and meets Mary Ballantyne, a hotshot reporter interested in his activities because of their possible connections with her beat. The alluring woman causes McAllister to ponder his glamorous past as an international correspondent and his staid and complicated future involving his impending wedding, his fiancée in recovery from an assault, and his uneasy position as a prospective stepfather. Implausible developments, the lack of crucial details early enough in the book, and a shortage of action weaken the narrative. Agent: Peter McGuigan, Foundry Literary + Media.

August 15, 2014
A newspaper editor is torn between his present life in the Highlands of Scotland in the 1950s and his past as a hotshot reporter. Glasgow-born John McAllister's fiance, Joanne Ross, suffered at the hands of her abusive ex-husband and then was badly hurt, mentally and physically, by a rogue colleague at the Highland Gazette, where she worked as a reporter. Now McAllister's own life is changed by a request from Jenny McPhee, matriarch of a family of tinkers. Jenny's son Jimmy, a friend of McAllister's, has gone missing. Although Jimmy is well able to take care of himself, his mother's second sight leads her to ask McAllister to go to Glasgow and track him down. There, he meets and is fascinated by Mary Ballantyne, an ambitious young reporter following in his footsteps but with the added advantage of coming from a wealthy, well-connected family. Jimmy is evidently involved in a blood feud with the dangerous Gordon family, and McAllister's childhood friend Gerry Dochery may well be the man sent to kill him. The prewar glories of Glasgow are well-hidden by bombed-out buildings and extreme poverty. But McAllister, still fascinated by the mean streets of his boyhood home, teams up with Mary to search for Jimmy and dig for dirt on the Gordon brothers and the razor gangs associated with Dochery. When his mother's flat is trashed as a warning, McAllister whisks her off and burrows even deeper into the case. Concerned by the slowness of Joanne's recovery and fearful of marriage in middle age, he lets his partnership with Mary and the excitement of the hunt spill over into his personal life, threatening everything he's built in his Highland home. Scott (North Sea Requiem, 2013, etc.) incisively sets the middle-aged hero's struggle to come to terms with his life against the violence of a decaying city and the clean beauty of the Highlands.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014
Readers of Scott's mysteries, set in a tiny town in the Highlands of Scotland in the fifties, may be a bit put out that the series heroine, Joanne Ross, is not at center stage this time. Fans of the series have seen Ross, a survivor of an abusive marriage, rise from part-time typist at the local newspaper to an absolutely intrepid, enterprising journalist during the first four novels. Now, Ross is recovering from a severe blow to the head administered in North Sea Requiem (2013). The focus necessarily shifts to Ross' longtime editor and current fianc', John McAllister, a one-time star war reporter for Glasgow's most respected daily. McAllister's life seems sadly reduced: he's moved from big-city journalist to the editor of a paper consisting mostly of engagement, birth, and death noticeswhat the Highland newsroom wags call Matched, Hatched, and Dispatched. And McAllister is ambivalent about his impending marriage to Ross, who seems a confused shadow of her former jokey, vivacious self. Enter a series of complications that call McAllister back to his beloved Glasgow: the disappearance of the son of a family friend; the involvement of McAllister's best childhood friend in a razor gang wreaking havoc on the city; his old paper asking him to investigate the gangs; and his infatuation with the paper's hotshot female crime reporter. This novel turns out to be a searing psychological portrait of a man at a crossroads. And, as usual in the series, it delivers suspense, fascinating details about postwar Scotland, and vivid portrayals of both back alley and glen.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)