Enforcer Nate Colgan first appeared in Malcolm Mackay’s The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, the explosive gateway to a series of novels focusing on a Glasgow organised crime network. Colgan didn’t have much of a role to play as the ex-boyfriend of Zara Cope who, in the Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, is shacked up with a minor drug dealer who trespasses on someone else’s turf and subsequently pays the price. Colgan was one of the most memorable characters in the novel, and somehow it just makes sense to find him spearheading Every Night I Dream of Hell.

Every Night I Dream of Hell is the fifth novel in the Glasgow crime series. The first three in the series (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, The Sudden Arrival of Violence) explore the turf war between mid-level gang-lord Peter Jamieson and used car dealer with ambition, Shug Francis. In a grow or die scenario, one of the gangs will be destroyed and/or cannibalized by the other.


In Every Night I Dream of Hell the turf war is over and Jamieson and his right hand man, John Young are in prison, and that leaves the remains of the Jamieson gang ‘managing’ the turf, the deals, the money and the bent coppers. Nate Colgan is hired as a “security consultant,” and it’s a role he’s not particularly comfortable with. Colgan sees the writing on the wall thanks to the in-fighting and overall lack of confidence in leadership, but a new threat appears in the form of a British gang who, smelling blood, have moved north to invade Jamieson’s territory. Naturally with a very visible, violent threat knocking at the door, Colgan is involved, but his position is made tougher by the fact that Zara Cope is involved up to her neck with the British gang.

Both Zara and Colgan are great characters. Colgan is a killer but he seems to have a cool head on his shoulders. It must have been a temporary lapse in judgement that caused him to allow the sly, opportunistic Zara to creep under his covers. Or perhaps women are his Achilles’ Heel? Colgan knows better than to get involved with Zara again, and yet there’s something there he can’t resist.

There was something sweet and sticky in her words, a trap I didn’t like the sound of.

Zara may be a lowly figure in the crime world, but she’s in the sights of DI Fisher:

You can’t chase every rat; you will end up getting lost in the sewers. You catch the ones you can. You keep an eye out for the most rotten of them; you don’t get distracted from the bigger picture. But some, Jesus, some of them you can’t stop chasing. It’s not a professional thing to admit to, no cop should get sidetracked by a criminal of no importance, but it happens. Someone infests your mind. Might be a victim you just have to help. Might be a criminal you just have to catch. Everything else drops into the background.

There’s a lot of back story to the plot, and this is supposed to either jog our memories of the last four books or fill in the blanks (if we haven’t read the books), but the catch-up occasionally weighs down Mackay’s bleak, machine gun -style. Any reader should do themselves a favour and read at least the first three books first–otherwise you may be completely lost in the sea of names and past associations. Those who’ve already read the earlier books won’t be able to resist this one.

For this reader, Every Night I Dream of Hell, although it involved the same turf, some of the same characters, and the network and hierarchy of a brutal criminal gang, wasn’t quite up to the standard of the previous four. This may be because Colgan is a lot like the gunman MacLean in many aspects–wanting a slice of normal life but understanding that it comes at too high a price.

review copy.

EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL
Malcolm Mackay
Mulholland Books
ISBN 978-0316271776
Hardcover
Thriller


The idea of a subgenre known as “Tartan Noir” --- dark Scottish crime fiction --- might seem a bit of a stretch. I mean, the reflexive impression of Scotland for a lot of people, including me, consists of fog, hills, bagpipes and terri...er, unusual food, with two large industrial cities plunked down in the middle of it all. Crime? What crime? Lots of it, apparently. Scotland, according to the United Nations (yes, take what follows with a grain of salt, but still) is the world’s most violent developed country. Whether it deserves that ranking or otherwise, there are certainly enough violent assaults happening in Scotland to cause folks to take notice, and to, yes, create a subgenre around them. Accordingly, one can pick up a Scottish crime novel without being armed with the same suspension of disbelief that might be needed when reading other fine series in which murders occur in ski resort towns (among other places) with remarkable regularity.

All of this brings us to EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL, a new work by Malcolm Mackay, author of the rightfully acclaimed trio of books known as The Glasgow Trilogy. EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL is technically a work which stands alone from that series but nonetheless references events which took place therein. I cannot frankly imagine a situation where anyone picking up this novel would not want to immediately dive into Mackay’s past work, which is its own, fully-realized dark criminal universe. EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL is narrated primarily though not exclusively through the voice of Nate Colgan, a so-called security enforcer for Peter Jamieson’s criminal organization. Jamieson’s arrest by Glasgow DI Michael Fisher and subsequent imprisonment has set off a chain reaction occasioned by the truism that nature abhors a vacuum. There is immediate jockeying for position, primarily between two parties. Angus Lafferty, a major drug importer under Jamieson’s reign, wants to take over but his considerable reach in this regard may exceed his grasp. Meanwhile, it is rumored that Adrian Barrett, a drug dealer whose small empire in Birmingham crashed and burned, may be in Glasgow with his crew, attempting to take over Jamieson’s turf. Fuel is added to this rumor when Lee Christie, one of Lafferty’s dealers, is summarily executed. The incident is taken by Lafferty as a warning and he immediately tasks Jamieson’s people with finding Barrett and his crew and exacting revenge. Zara Cope, a very dangerous woman with ties to both Colgan and Fisher, suddenly returns to Glasgow as this is occurring. Colgan is quick to make the connection. Things come to a boil quickly in EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL, and soon overflow. One does not want to become too deeply attached to any of the characters, given that it is clear from the beginning of the story that any one or all of them may not make it to the story’s final pages. It is a dark read, complex but satisfying, and all the more real for it.

A final word: Bless Malcolm Mackay! Yes. Bless him! And bless Mulholland Books with him for including a glossary of characters at the beginning of this affair. EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL is of average length for a novel (a fact that belies the superior quality within) but it has an abundance of characters therein, all of them bumping into each other and interacting in all sorts of ways, violent and (occasionally) otherwise). The glossary of cast of characters is thus more than welcome, especially for those of us of a certain age who can easily get the names of our adult children confused, let alone strangers in a novel. Thank you. Authors and publishers of other books: please take note. It is but one reason that I highly recommend EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2017, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

This review has been posted on MBTB's Mystery Book Blog:

What’s the difference between a corporation and a crime gang? Not much. There’s bureaucracy, protocol, board meetings, equipment theft, spies and double-dealers, and sudden employee termination. And security services.

Nate Colgan is a single father and beats people up for a living. He’s “security” for one of the factions under the umbrella of gang boss Peter Jamieson. Unfortunately, Jamieson is in jail, and there is a quiet reorganization going on that threatens to be not so quiet in the end. In aid of understanding this organizational hierarchy, author Malcolm Mackay has included a cast of characters list at the beginning of the book. It does help assuage the anxiety over who is doing what to whom, as the characters relentlessly roll through the story for a while.

In the end, it boils down to Nate and his new trainee, Ronnie Malone, a young man in love, with a need to belong to the toughest organization in Glasgow, Scotland. Didn’t I mention that you have to read this book with a Scottish accent? Joining a long line of dark, moody, noirish, Scottish writers, Malcolm Mackay has been producing a fistful of dark, moody, noirish, Scottish books.

Nate’s long-gone girlfriend and mother of his nine-year-old daughter, Zara Cope, contacts him. She wants to talk. As a by-product of his job, Nate has learned to shut down most of his emotions. Zara, however, can still prick at his shell a little. He learns she’s in town with a new flame, and the new flame is out for a toehold in the now unstable criminal world of Glasgow. Normally, Nate would punch out the competition and send them running back to where they belong, but Zara is his daughter’s mother, however meaningless and inaccurate that title may be.

Nate senses the possibility of some double-dealing going on, but who would be behind it? (Remember, Mackay has provided a long list of possibilities.) Eighty percent of the chapters are first-person narratives by Nate. The few that aren’t focus on DI Michael Fisher, an honest cop, and Zara.

Near the end of Mackay’s story, which had progressed in a fairly straightforward manner, I couldn’t help but think that there surely had to be another brogue ready to drop, such is the nature of crime storytelling these days. So, yes, there were a few brogues tossed about.

In the end, it really is Nate’s story. It is his part in the complex unravelling of the loyalties. It is his life and what he and others have made of it. It is his love for another human being, his daughter, that taps at the hard carapace he has constructed. The title, “Every Night I Dream of Hell,” is ironic in a way, because Nate has a hard time sleeping. He operates almost mechanically at times, even when he should be on high alert. “Every Night I Dream of Hell” should be subtitled, “And Every Day I Live in Hell.”

Actually, “Every Night I Dream of Hell” is a great short story jacketed by a compendium of what it takes to run a criminal organization. It can be fascinating if you take it that way, and I often found it interesting.

For the past couple of days I have been using this book to escape into a world of crime. While I did really enjoy most of this book there were twists towards the end that were a bit predictable and that really lessened my enjoyment of this book. The main character, Nate, was a very interesting character to follow. I would consider reading more from this author.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley.