DETECTIVE Sergeant Gus Thoroughgood is back on the streets of Glasgow in The Longest Shadow. Beginning on top of Scotland's iconic Wallace Monument, when a skeleton from Thoroughgood's past threatens to put the full stop on his future, the action comes at the reader like a runaway train. In the third instalment of RJ Mitchell's gritty Glaswegian crime thriller series, Thoroughgood finds himself in pursuit of a suspect he believes is the psychopathic leader of a vicious gang wanted for murder and abduction. The streets of Glasgow's West End and city centre are the location for a high octane pursuit that leaves the reader gasping for breath, before culminating in a life and death struggle on top of one of Glasgow's most famous landmarks, the Rennie Mackintosh designed Glasgow school of Art - but does Thoroughgood have the right man? Just as he defies death to thwart the gang, Thoroughgood's complicated love life ensnares him in the battle for control of the Roxburgh Whisky...

"They call Scottish crime fiction 'tartan noir' -- and if that's the case, then the thread of red that runs through Parallel Lines is a river of blood, and the blacks and greens are the bruises on a battered corpse. This book doesn't pull any punches in its depiction of a deadly cops-and-robbers feud that strays far beyond the procedural into the personal. At the core of the story is a traditional love triangle -- the hero, the villain and the girl that gets between them -- but it's Mitchell's first-hand knowledge of what goes on behind the police station's closed doors that sets the book apart. This is a real page-turner: once that plot is set in motion, like a car with its brake pipes cut hurtling down a steep Glasgow street -- and that's an image from the book you won't forget -- it carries the reader right through to its bullet-strewn climax." ALAN MORRISON, Group Arts Editor, Herald & Times