The Riverman - Alex Gray

There is certainly scope to make something of The Riverman’s Glasgow settings for a crime novel and Alex Gray’s novel certainly sets its targets right mixing old style corruption and murder with the gleaming tower-blocks and executive apartments of the renovated old dock area of the Clyde. Regardless of its cleaned-up image, prestigious office buildings and space-age designs, bodies still regularly turn up in the Clyde in the traditional manner.

An important multinational accountancy firm has its headquarters there – Forbes-McGregor are a local company done good, with offices located across the world, however they have a foothold in some murkier dealings in Glasgow. When one of their senior executives tumbles onto the irregularities and fears an Enron-type scandal, he brings it to the attention of his superiors. The next time he is seen, he is being fished out of the Clyde by the Riverman, who patrols the waters and knows its dangers well.

One dead body – fine; but two dead bodies in the same firm, a day apart, both their personnel files mysteriously wiped from the computer system? That isn’t exactly going to divert attention away from Forbes-McGregor’s activities as they might have hoped, is it now? The canny Glasgow police have a feeling that these two suspicious deaths just might be linked. And therein lies the problem with this “detective” novel. Neither DCI Lorimer nor psychological profiler Solly Brightman really have anything to contribute to the investigation other than the hunch that things just don’t add up. With precious little detection involved, Lorimer just has to sit back while the improbably incompetent killers commit further acts of gross stupidity, leaving more bodies littered around Glasgow and the Clyde, until the detective deduces that those managers still alive must be the ones behind it all. Brilliant.

Thrown into the mix are the usual personal problems at home for the police detective – Lorimer’s wife concerned that he has had an affair while she was on leave of absence for a year in America. Why is he behaving suspiciously and keeping secrets from her? Apart from the fact that he is a police officer on a sensitive case? Feeling very much an add-in, despite efforts to parallel it with other elements of the enquiry, this turns out to be rather humdrum and unconvincingly integrated to the story. Not only is The Riverman lacking something on this, as well as on the crime and the detection fronts, but it’s not well-written either, with ominous, manipulative foreshadowing and rather weak, clichéd dialogue.  Despite its flaws, it’s lean, tight and to the point and did keep me reading right through to its unlikely conclusion.