Grass

Leo and Sean are young teenagers who, when we first meet them, are happy-go-lucky boys whose idea of adventure is to ramble across the derelict landscape of their environment and concoct imaginary stories about what might be going on there. This is contemporary Scotland or, more exactly, a near-Glaswegian corner of it, where practices such as money-lending, protection rackets and drug-dealing flourish and where ‘hard men, bad men’ (such as Nelis, Armour and McCrae, the unsavoury villains of the piece) control and manipulate the local gangs. Following his accidental viewing of a murder perpetrated by Armour, Leo becomes drawn into a shadowy, criminal world, a situation which is to see him forfeit his friendship with Sean and alienate his family: his own sense of morality will be tested and the conventional wisdoms about the advisability or otherwise of ‘grassing’ will be questioned. By this stage it strikes Leo as it will strike the reader, that boyhood games have given way to some chilling realities and that the notion of heroism is open to many interpretations. MacPhail handles her gritty material – particularly the machinations of gangland – with skill, her sense of setting is well sustained and she gives us a novel which satisfyingly blends crime and thriller genres.