Gordon Ferris

The "hanging shed" of the title is located in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison, where former soldier Hugh Donovan has been sent after being found guilty of murdering a young boy. Desperate to clear his name, he sends a message to an old friend, Douglas Brodie, who is scraping by as a journalist in London. Brodie is skeptical about his old friend's claim, not least because of the mountain of evidence against him, but eventually the journalist's desire for the truth plunges him fully into the show more investigation.

This is an excellent book to read if you are interested in finding about how Glasgow fared in the wake of the Second World War. The story takes place in 1946 and the characters find themselves having to adjust to the changed circumstances of their city and how they themselves have been changed by the war. Brodie makes a likeable narrator, and his narration is crammed full of details about day-to-day life in the city and around Scotland. I did manage to predict one element of the plot, but overall I found the book fascinating and hard to put down. Will definitely be continuing with this series! show less

This was a very surprising book for me. I was recommended this series by Goodreads, and thought I'd give it a try, but I wasn't prepared for this book at all. I thought it would be a nice historical mystery and since that's my favourite mystery genre, I thought it would be worth a try. Well this book blew me away. Think Jack Reacher with a Scottish brogue in the late 1940's just after WWII, and that might give you a better idea, but it still won't prepare you for the awesomeness of this show more book. Douglas Brodie is our hero, and he is originally from Glasgow and has been recently demobbed out of the British army. More similarities to Reacher, but Brodie was more like special forces than military police. And before he signed up of the Highland regiment, he was a police officer on the mean streets of Glasgow. Now Brodie is a stringer reporter working in London and he gets a call from an old pal to come back to Glasgow to help him. His pal, who he thought was killed in the war, is actually alive but horribly burned, and he is facing the death penalty for the rape and murder of a young Glasgow boy. Brodie doesn't want to go back to his home town, but something draws him there and he meets his old friend in the prison where he is being kept awaiting execution. Brodie finds something believable in Hugh's story and teams up with a young lawyer by the name of Samantha (Sam) Campbell to try to find evidence to get an execution stay. And the the story just blows up from there until Brodie finds himself in grave personal danger, and as he plumbs the depths of the Glasgow underworld he discovers corruption, murder and scandal that includes not only some unsavoury Scottish gangs, but all the way into the police department and the judicial system. The creep list gets longer and longer, and Brodie sets out to eliminate them all one by one with the help of Sam. I couldn't put this book down, and I highly recommend it. It's a stunning thriller that just never lets up. show less

I was expecting an edge-of-my-seat thriller with this the second book in the Douglas Brodie series. The first one blew me away, and this one is just as good, if not better. We open the book about six months after the big bang ending of The Hanging Shed. Douglas is a junior reporter on the Glasgow Gazette. He counts himself lucky to be doing the job he loves when so many of his ex-army buddies are out of work and with no prospects. But Brodie being Brodie, he finds himself in some pretty hot show more water with a local gang of thugs who are taking the law into their own hands. Brodie's stories in the Gazette about this gang are beginning to make a name for himself. But there is a lot of crime in Glasgow just after WWII, and pretty soon more and more bodies are popping up. Brodie and his friend Sam (Samantha) are drawn into a political and local governance conspiracy which turns out to be very dangerous for them and the people they know. The last 8 chapters of the book are filled with more action and mayhem than anyone who is not a Brodie afficiando would be surprised by, but for me it was what I expected - heart-pounding action, fast-moving plot and written so well by Ferris that it all seemed real. You could read this book as a stand-alone book, but you will get more of the Brodie experience if you read The Hanging Shed first. I love this guy and the wonderful Sam. I highly recommend this series to anyone who is fond of the thriller genre with an historical twist and also anyone who likes books that provide very colourful descriptions of the time and place that the book is set in. Scotland and Glasgow come alive in Ferris's prose, and Douglas Brodie and Samantha Campbell are my new favourite crime fighting team. show less

As 1947 draws to a close, cop-turned-journalist Douglas Brodie's seemingly simple investigation into a string of burglaries leads to revisiting the horrors of the concentration camps in the Second World War. The book covers a lot of ground and highlights in particular the effects of post-traumatic stress; Ferris's portrayal of Brodie and his old colleague (?) Danny McRae and their differing approaches to trauma is well done. I also liked how Brodie's girlfriend, advocate Samantha Campbell, show more played a key role in moving the investigation along. In retrospect this book might not have been the best choice to read during the holiday season, because of the heavy subject matter, so I assigned my rating on the basis of how I would rate it under more "normal" reading conditions. show less