Review
'Campbell Armstrong - the literary equivalent of an AK47' The Glasgow Daily Record Armstrong is a wonderfully atmospheric writer who shines a light into the dark corners of the human heart' The Sunday Telegraph 'The joy in Armstrong's novel is his effortless flicks of characterisation, his bittersweet insights. ...Armstrong's skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.' The Scotsman
Product Description
Detective Lou Perlman has become an outcast from police HQ, doomed by a sadistic Chief-Superintendent to a seemingly infinite 'sick-list'. Deprived of doing battle with Glasgow's criminal underworld - which he needs the way a junkie needs a fix - he's barred from participating in the investigation of the bloodbath that has rocked the foundations of the city's lower depths. A new man has powered and blasted his way to the top of Glasgow's gangster fraternity, Reuben Chuck, a villain who promotes cruelty and murder even as he pursues an inscrutable religious awakening of his own. Only a gruesome discovery made in Perlman's own house invigorates him, and launches him into a simple inquiry that quickly becomes a ganglia of perplexities - the whereabouts of his missing love Miriam, body parts, a seemingly haunted house, dubious part-time surgeons, a mob of dangerous hooded teenagers, a ferret, and his own family's history - all leading, inexorably, strangely, to the deathly terrain of Reuben Chuck. In "Butcher", nothing is ever cleancut.
