«The great McIlvanney themes - class, guilt, the power of the book, the difficulty of goodness - are all there, seething under the surface»

Stuart Kelly, * Daily Telegraph *

«Remarkable . . . everything in the novel is illuminated by the play of a subtle, sceptical and yet affirmative intelligence»

Allan Massie, * Scotland on Sunday *

«Wonderfully witty and wistful»

* Daily Mail *

«William McIlvanney paints a world of harsh reality, but does so in language that is strangely beautiful and hauntingly poetic»

Craig Russell

William McIlvanney's first novel, Remedy is None, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and with Docherty he won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers' Association. Strange Loyalties, the third in the Detective Laidlaw trilogy, won the Glasgow Herald's People's Prize. He died in December 2015.