In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide

Saviors #1

by Malcolm Mackay

The independent kingdom of Scotland flourished until the beginning of the last century. Its great trading port of Challaid, in the north west of the country, sent ships around the world and its merchants and bankers grew rich on their empire in Central America. But Scotland is not what it was, and the docks of Challaid are almost silent. The huge infrastructure projects collapsed, like the dangerous railway tunnels under the city. And above ground the networks of power and corruption are all that survive of Challaid's glorious past. Darian Ross is a young private investigator whose father, an ex cop, is in prison for murder. He takes on a case brought to him by a charismatic woman, Maeve Campbell. Her partner has been stabbed; the police are not very curious about the death of a man who laundered money for the city's criminals. Ross is drawn by his innate sense of justice and his fascination with Campbell into a world in which no-one can be trusted.

Genres: Crime, Fiction

315 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Malcolm Mackay was born and grew up in Stornoway where he still lives. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, his debut, is the first of a trilogy set in the Glasgow underworld.

Reviews

[Raven · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s always interesting to see an established crime author suddenly take a wee flight of fancy. and toy with their reader’s expectations, sometimes successful, and sometimes not. Although an ardent admirer of Mackay’s work to date, I must admit that this book perplexed and delighted me in equal measure, with its linear Chandler-esque crime mystery, replete with world weary private investigators, bent coppers, devious men of business, and a splendid femme fatale. This arc of the plot worked on every level, littered with Mackay’s trademark dark cynical humour and explosive interludes of down and dirty violence, and was a complete pleasure as always.
However, I did find myself slightly less engaged with the whole parallel history malarkey, and the punctuation throughout the text of assorted newspaper articles, historical referencing and so on illustrating the changing fortunes of Challaid throughout the years. It was disruptive to the flow, thus making the book feel like two distinctly different parts of the whole, whereas if both parts had been fleshed out into two books it would maybe not felt quite as jarring and disconnected. Despite this criticism, I feel that the Challaid story would be worth revisiting by Mackay, but maybe bound up in a more pure fantasy style, if such a thing is possible. Not without its charm, and an interesting experiment, but a little unbalanced overall, but glad to see Mackay still rocking the unfeasibly long book title, and his hardboiled edge. Worth a look though.

[Brett T · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes a mystery writer wants a location in which to set his or her protagonists so we find ourselves in cities or towns with the same names as those we know, although they're a little bit altered to suit the narrative. Robert B. Parker's Boston home for Spenser is very clearly mapped onto the Boston we might visit. Sometimes the writers make up new cities, as Evan Hunter did when writing the 87th Precinct novels as Ed McBain. His Isola is New York City, but swapped out so Hunter can manipulate it in ways to which the actual NYC might not end itself.

And then sometimes the writer just changes the whole world. Len Deighton allowed the Germans to successfully invade England in SS-GB, and Malcolm Mackay made the Darien expedition a success in order to make a northwestern seaport in an independent Scotland and tailor the city to his liking in In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide, the first novel set in the aging and deteriorating port of Challaid.

The alternative historical elements play mostly to set the scene of the story and disappear whenever we're moving through the narrative itself. Characters still Google things and have iPhones, and aside from a couple of mentions of different sports teams and a King of Scotland, the different world doesn't intrude on the plot. It centers on the murder of a small-time money launderer, which goes unsolved by the police long enough for the man's girlfriend to hire her own agents to find out what happened. The girlfriend, Maeve Campbell, has an interest in finding the killer because the police suspect her. The men she hires, young Darian Ross and experienced ex-cop Sholto Douglas, are more than happy with their fee but have to navigate a tightrope as they look into the murder. Non-police investigators are either licensed detectives -- and thus police lapdogs in corrupt Challaid -- or "researchers" technically unable to probe a crime legally. Even when Ross and Douglas produce a suspect, the sinister operators of Challaid's organized crime rings and the corrupt police officers in league with them seem to have the pair and Maeve herself spot on a target for their own plans.

Mackay's best known to this point as the writer of the "Glasgow Underworld" series that began with the story of a hit man in The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. He displays significant crime and hard-boiled tale chops in that series and puts them to good use in these new stories as well. Although Ross and Douglas are mostly on the right side of the law, they live and move in a world where those lines aren't always as bright and the actors on the stage not as clearly categorized. Cage suffers from some inconsistent world-building -- Mackay likes to use interstitial news articles and such to set up the history of the Challaid world and the people in it. But he doesn't always tie these intermissions into his narrative as solidly as he could in order to make their speed-bump characteristics worth the time. The plot complicates itself into enough confusion that the actual solution to the crime makes just a bit more than no sense at all.

Mackay displays style and a gift for crafting hard-case, world-weary characters who stubbornly cling to ideas of honor and human dignity in a life that rewards neither. So a couple more novels in the world of Cage could be worth the read, but unless he manages to give his plots enough backbone to stay coherent enough to know what those characters are doing then any that come along after that could very well be consigned to the pages of histories that never happened.

Original available here.

[Eleanor · Rating 2 out of 5]

There ought to be a law that if your book has a crackerjack premise, you must execute it with commensurate panache. I don’t know how this might be enforced – through the imposition of a fine, perhaps? – but it might stop books like In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide from getting me really excited and then letting me down hard. It’s a crime novel set in a Scotland that never signed the Act of Union, so the country has always been independent of England, and has relied for the past several centuries on its Central American empire, the Caledonian States. (In this version of history, the Darien scheme was a smashing success.) Malcolm Mackay sets the novel in the northwest port town of Challaid, which is slowly dying as industry dries up. Darien Ross, a private investigator with a jailbird ex-cop dad, a mildly criminal older brother, and a lot of fine lines to tread, takes a case from a classic noir femme fatale: Maeve Campbell walks into the office he shares with his boss and asks him to track down the man who stabbed her boyfriend, a money launderer descended from Caledonian immigrants. Ross, of course, takes the case.

The setup is great. It’s a shame, then, that the pay-off is so minimal. For what Mackay does with his cleverly imagined setting is to write a noir crime novel so straight that it could just as easily be set in Cardiff, or Manchester, or anywhere vaguely northern and rainy. As a novel about a private investigator goes, it hits all the beats it needs to (although there are some frustrating choices in Maeve’s characterisation, and in the revelation of the killer). But there are a million things about an independent Scotland that could have been developed: what are its relations with its southern neighbour? Why are its industries in decline? (It must be a reason that has nothing to do with English rule and/or political decisions, but we don’t get to hear it.) There are hints of unrest regarding immigration from the Caledonian states, which are agitating for independence; Ross interviews a waiter from Costa Rica who will be entitled to a Scottish passport if he can just keep working in Challaid for another two months. But nothing is made of it, it doesn’t go anywhere. You can’t entice readers with the promise of world-building and then avoid building the world. The “primary source” documents which interleave the chapters – historic newspaper articles, investigative reports, etc. – are perhaps an attempt to do this implicitly, but they are not elegantly integrated into the main narrative, and therefore are less of a help than an obstacle. It’s a shame, especially given that the last alternative-history book I read (KJ Whittaker’s phenomenal False Lights, back in September) managed its world-building so well.

[Jennifer Gottschalk · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the kind of book where one reads it to find out how it ends and then regrets the time spent.

I was deeply unimpressed with the plot and struggled to keep track of what was happening. The characters were uninspired and generally unlikable and the setting was both dreary and depressing. The ending was unsatisfying and more than a few loose ends were left hanging.

There was far too much going on and readers are not given enough clues to have any hope of working out who the perpetrator of the crime was.

This is one of those times where perseverance and persistence on my part were not rewarded.

[David Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of the author’s previous work. I almost gave this a 4 as it was “disappointing” compared to his previous works centered in Glasgow and the characters I know from those novels. That having been said this is still a good and well written book. It also has potential in terms of characters to develop in a new series or additional novels. Would like to hear more about Darian, more from Sholto, Sorley and Vivienne. It’s such a different direction from his previous novels but it’s worth the read.

[Tom Lindsay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the book very confusing. The world created by the author just didn't ring true in any way, perhaps by the constant, but inconsistent, mixing of Gaelic and English names, places and culture. The characters were not entirely believable and the plot was weak, at best. It does not cry out for any sequel. The author's other works are far superior.

[Zoe Radley · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s fine... that’s really all I can say about it.. I like having the sort of interesting legends, crime sheets or newspaper stuff in there but.. the whole mystery was well shite the pi or whatever were awful. All the characters just felt flat like Diet Coke left out for a couple of days. I have the second book but not sure if I really care about this to even bother picking it up.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall impression was this was a self-indulgent wander into a bit of world-building, possibly one thwarted when a child.

The detective bits (the main story), the writing good and fresh and exciting as any other of Mackay's novels, but for me, the intervening bits of history and newspaper reports felt superfluous.

[Sadie Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit boring at times. Good storyline, but slow.

[Angie Oberhauser · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first 80 pages of this book very confusing. The random drops never really fit in well. Just write a paragraph or 2 of backstory. About 100 pages it grew on me but overall seemed oddly dated and sexist while in modern times. Minus 1 star for the ending. I got the 2nd book with this one and will read it when I am in the mood for something campy.

I received this and white i ivy as part of my thriller club subscription and as a consequence of both canceled the subscription.