A bonnie thriller

The Hanging Shed

THIS, the fourth novel from Scotland’s Gordon Ferris, is a pacey, engaging period thriller set in Glasgow in 1946. Our hero is Douglas Brodie, ex-police officer and veteran of the war against Hitler, now a budding crime journalist sought out by one time friend and later romantic rival Hugh Donovan. Donovan has been sentenced to the gallows for raping and murdering a young boy, but it is a crime he claims he didn’t commit.

Badly burned during his RAF service, Donovan now looks like “something stitched together by a one-handed seamstress”. Since his release from hospital he has become a heroin addict and a drug pusher, a gaunt figure in a dark coat skulking through the shadows. He is a man with no credibility in whose rooms the murdered boy’s bloodied clothes were found. What’s worse, in a drug-addled fugue he confessed to police.