YA - The Glasgow Chronicles 3It is 1969 and 14-year-old Paul McBride is discharged from Lennox Castle Psychiatric Hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown whilst serving a 3-year sentence in St Ninian’s Approved School in Stirling. St Ninians has refused to take Paul back because of his disruptive behaviour. As a last resort, the authorities agree for Paul to recuperate in the foster care of an elderly couple, Innes and Whitey McKay, on a remote croft in the Kyle of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands. They have also decided that if Paul can stay out of trouble for a few months, until his fifteenth birthday, he will be released from his sentence and can return home to Glasgow. Unbeknown to the authorities, Innes McKay is one of the most notorious poachers in the Kyle, where his family has, for generations, been in conflict with Lord John MacDonald, the Duke of the Kyle of Sutherland, who resides in nearby Culrain Castle. Innes is soon teaching his young charge the age-old skills of the Highland poacher. Inevitably, this leads to conflict between the street-wise youth from the tenements in Glasgow and the Duke’s estate keepers, George and Cameron Sellar, who are direct descendants of Patrick Sellar, reviled for his role in The Highland Clearances. 

Fiction > Crime | Irish Historical - The Glasgow Chronicle #7After visiting Johnboy Taylor, Scotland’s longest-serving young offender, in Dumfries Young Offenders Institution, Nurse Senga Jackson heads back to Glasgow, unaware of the mortal danger that she and her flatmate, Lizzie Mathieson are in after Lizzie unwittingly overhears the deathbed confession of a dying gangster to Inspector Paddy ‘The Stalker’ McPhee, who has threatened to expose the sordid sex-life of the doctor on duty, in order to access the intensive care unit of Stobhill General Hospital in the middle of the night. With half of The Mankys, Glasgow’s most up and coming young criminal gang, serving time in Dumfries, including their charismatic leader, Tony Gucci, responsibility for the safety of Senga Jackson and her flatmate is placed in the hands of nineteen-year-old Simon Epstein, a young entrepreneur in the Cowcaddens district of the city. Despite the odds being stacked against The Mankys and the two young nurses, Simon joins up with one of Glasgow’s top criminal legal teams in the battle to secure the evidence that could prove that Johnboy Taylor is innocent of shooting two police officers in a bank robbery in Maryhill. At the same time, Simon continues to duck and dive behind the neon lights of the dirty city, in a desperate attempt to keep the two girls alive.