Every Night I Dream of Hell Hardcover – April 11, 2017 by Malcolm Mackay (Mulholland Books)

It’s hard to get good help these days. That’s the complaint of the stressed-out Glaswegian gangsters in EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), a piece of writing that lives up to its gritty title. It’s especially difficult to find disciplined professionals like Nate Colgan, an enforcer for the Jamieson gang and the reliable chronicler of Malcolm Mackay’s novel. Although he’s skilled at handling the dirty jobs, Nate is no meathead. “Times had changed,” he explains. “Big organizations had become more sophisticated and the standard of muscle had gone up.”

But with Peter Jamieson in prison, the wheels seem to be coming off his efficient machine. Between the assassination of business associates like Lee Christie and takeover threats from ambitious insiders like Angus Lafferty, it’s clear to Nate that “the old boss, and the old certainties, were gone” and the leadership is up for grabs. “The problem,” in his opinion, is “gunmen. Hard to pick up a good one” and impossible to make a permanent hire, given the sorry state of the organization. It’s in this atmosphere of unrest (some might call it chaos) that Nate is elevated to the role of “security consultant” and charged with keeping a lid on Adrian Barrett, an English mobster escorted into town by Nate’s former lover, Zara Cope, in order to poach on local turf.

It’s a joy to wallow in the muck with Mackay, who writes in a bold style that reflects confidence rather than bravado, occasionally breaking up the tension with a wry joke. (His definition of a “paranoid crew” of hit men: “two to do the work and two to check up on the two doing the work.”) And he isn’t afraid to show Nate at his violent worst because he knows that, like Zara, we can’t get enough of this morally complex antihero. Nate survives by believing himself to be a good man in a bad job, a rationalization Zara brushes off. “The rest of the world knows you’re the bad guy,” she says, “the man that the beasts are scared of.” There’s a reason Nate can’t sleep at night: “The only world darker than the one I lived in was the one I slept in.”