Paperboy -From the winning author of the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime book

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DCI Alison McCoist returns newly promoted and more isolated than ever, a position that brings authority without affection. Her latest case begins beneath a flyover, where a body has been left to decay, chewed by rats and stripped of dignity. It is not an ending so much as an entry point.

Elsewhere in the city, Chuck Gardner runs a paper-shredding business built on discretion and luck, neither of which has ever quite held. When he stumbles across documents that were meant to disappear for good, his private vices and public usefulness collide. The information has value. So does his silence.

Paperboy draws these threads together into a Glasgow where criminal enterprise and institutional failure are tightly knotted. As McCoist digs deeper, corruption surfaces in places designed to conceal it, and loyalties prove dangerously flexible. The novel balances bleak humour with moral bite, attentive to how power protects itself and how easily damage is passed downward. In a city where nothing is ever fully destroyed, the question is not what has been uncovered, but who will survive what follows.