Top 10 Scottish Books

July 2007

1. Condor Blues
2. The Other Mrs Jordan
3. Crimelord
4. Bible John's Secret Daughter
5. The Literary Traveller in Scotland
6. The Happy Dust Gang
7. The Royal Highland Fusiliers
8.The Royal Scots
9.The Black Watch
10.Scottish Exodus

CONDOR BLUES is an action-packed, dramatic and true account of contemporary soldiering. It also shatters the conspiracy of silence over the direction of British operations in post-war Iraq. Gallantry medals may have been awarded on a scale unprecedented for half a century, but in winning the battles the British Army lost the peace.

Author Mark Nicol focuses on the lives of two platoons based at the isolated Camp Condor in Iraq's Maysan Province. The soldiers' task was to live with and train Iraqi Civil Defence Corps recruits. Their lives jack-knifed from moments of force to farce, and they engaged in disturbing yet amusing pranks on a daily basis.

They were also plunged into the biggest and bloodiest battles involving British forces in Iraq. After one firefight they carried the broken bodies of those they had slain from the battlefield - the emotional impact was devastating.

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews,CONDOR BLUES is an honest and visceral account of soldiering in a brutal environment. The flawed thinking, the missed opportunities and the 'heavy metal' tactics that proved so counterproductive are all laid bare, making this essential reading for anyone seeking an impartial account of the most violent and controversial period of modern British military history.

'I am the other Mrs Jordan.'

On a damp, grey April morning in 2006, Mary Turner Thomson received a call that was to blow her life apart. The woman on the other end of the line calmly told her that she and Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married for fourteen years and had five children together.

THE OTHER MRS JORDAN is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated and deceived an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of over £200,000 and leaving her near bankrupt to bring up the children he claimed he was physically incapable of fathering.

It's a story that we all think could never happen to us, but before dismissing her as an easily duped, desperate woman, read how Jordan entrapped Mary with his promises of love and a life together, learn how this shameless conman has been doing the same thing to other women for over 26 years and how he concocted the most intricate of cover stories, claiming to be a CIA agent to cover his frequent unexplained absences.

How far would you go to help the man that you loved? How far would he go to deceive you?

CRIMELORD is the gripping rags-to-riches story of elusive multi-millionaire gangster Tam McGraw.

When hash started to flood into Scotland from the late 1980s onwards, suspicion centred on McGraw, leader of the Infamous Barlanark Team. After a two-year surveillance operation, police discovered the drug had been hidden in buses carrying young footballers and deprived Glasgow families on free holidays abroad in a scam worth over £40 million. Police claimed McGraw was the mastermind, but in 1998 a jury declared him innocent while other suspects were jailed.

As McGraw refuses to discuss his life publicly, his remarkable tale is told through friends, fellow crooks and the occasional rival. It is an outrageous, often hilarious, true gangster story.

There was one partner the pretty young women who danced away the 1960s in Glasgow's Barrowlands were desperate to avoid: Bible John, so named because he quoted scripture to his victims. He was being hunted for three brutal unsolved sex murders, and each of his victims had been picked up after a night at the famous dance hall.

Police were still investigating the first terrifying murder when Hannah Martin was raped on her way home from the Barrowlands. When Bible John struck twice more, Hannah confided to friends that his description matched that of her own attacker.

The next shock came when Hannah discovered she was pregnant. Her distraught father banished her from the family home and forced her to give her child up for adoption.

She would never see her daughter again, but in a bizarre twist three decades later, an investigation into the infamous World's End murder would result in Hannah's daughter discovering the identity of the mother she never knew. Tragically, the news came too late for them to be reunited but it set her on a course to uncover the shocking secrets of her mother's life.

Did Hannah know Bible John? What did Hannah Martin reveal of her baby's father? How did she then become a member of a multimillion-pound drug-smuggling gang? Why, after expecting a huge bounty, did she die in poverty? The answers are all here in Bible John's Secret Daughter.

THE LITERARY TRAVELLER IN SCOTLAND opens up Scotland's literary landscape for the first time in one concise volume. All prominent Scottish writers from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century are included and discussed in their literary, historical and cultural contexts, set in the landscapes where they were born and which inspired them.

It details the birthplaces, childhoods, former homes and burial places of famous Scottish authors, uncovers sites, restaurants and pubs with a literary connection, and lists notable bookshops, literary museums and other places of relevance in the world of Scottish writing.

This attractive tome will be lavishly illustrated with photographs, while maps will enhance many of the entries, including the Kidnapped trail, Boswell and Johnson's Highland journey, Burns country, Richard Hannay's 39 Steps trail, the Pentland walks of Robert Louis Stevenson, a plan of Rosslyn Chapel, Gavin Maxwell's Sandaig, Compton Mackenzie's Barra, the Ettrick Valley of James Hogg, the Mearns of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, J.M. Barrie's Thrums and the ports and pubs of Para Handy, to name a few.

There has never been a national literary guide for Scotland until now, andTHE LITERARY TRAVELLER IN SCOTLAND will be a welcome first for book lovers all over the country and beyond.

Happy Dust Gang Charlie, snow, toot, white: cocaine goes by many different names. But in Glasgow in the early 1980s, they called it Happy Dust.

At no-holds-barred parties of the glamorous and wealthy, cocaine was the new aphrodisiac. A few lines of Charlie and a humdrum party could become an orgy.

Hot from the forests of Colombia, Charlie flooded onto the streets of Glasgow and was passed along the line to the cocktail set, highly paid sports stars and yuppies desperate for kicks and thrills. Behind it all was a man they called the Parachutist.

But all too soon, the party was over. People became too greedy and the Parachutist was double-crossed. Some of the gang did shady deals with detectives in hotel rooms; others flew to seek shelter in the sun, their reputations destroyed but not their fortunes.

The good times might have been over for the Happy Dust Gang, but their legacy lives on to this day.

The Royal Highland Fusiliers came into being in 1959 as a result of the amalgamation of two regiments, both of which had strong connections with Glasgow and the west of Scotland: The Royal Scots Fusiliers, founded in 1678 by Charles Erskine, fifth Earl of Mar; and The Highland Light Infantry, or HLI, created in 1881 as a result of the amalgamation of the 71st Highlanders and the 74th Highlanders.

Two distinctive infantry traditions can be found in the names of these regiments, which have helped to form the line infantry regiments of the British Army. Fusiliers were armed with the flintlock fusil instead of the more common matchlock musket, and light infantry came into being during the Napoleonic Wars to provide the army with a corps of skirmishing sharpshooters similar to Austrian and German Jäger troops.

Amongst those who have served as fusiliers or light infantrymen are Hugh Trenchard, who became Air Chief Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Winston Churchill and David Niven, who joined the HLI from Sandhurst in the inter-war years. All these traditions and personalities went into the making of a regiment whose name lives on in the 2nd battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, which was formed in 2006 as a result of the restructuring of the infantry regiments of the British Army.

This is the third in a series of eight regimental histories by Trevor Royle, following ROYAL SCOTS and THE BLACK WATCH.

The Royal Scots are Scotland's oldest infantry regiment, with a tradition that stretches back to 1633. This first concise history of the regiment is based largely on the recollections of several generations of Royal Scots - men like Private McBane, who carried his three-yearold son into battle at Malplaquet, and Private Begbie, the youngest soldier to serve in the First World War. These first-hand accounts take the reader through the great wars of the eighteenth century, when Britain was a rising global power, through the setbacks and the triumphs of the Napoleonic Wars and on to the glorious years of the nineteenth century. The two world wars of the twentieth century saw the Royals expand in size, and there are full accounts of its meritorious service on all the main battle fronts. More recently, the regiment has been involved in operations in the Balkans and Iraq. In 2006, in one of the most radical changes in the country's defence policy, the Royal Scots will be amalgamated into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. ROYAL SCOTS is, therefore, a timely celebration of the British Army's most venerable regiment, right of the line and second to none.

The Black Watch was formed at Aberfeldy in Perthshire in the early eighteenth century as an independent security force, or 'watch', to guard the approaches to the lawless areas of the Scottish Highlands.

Instantly recognisable due to the famous red hackle cap badge and the traditional dark blue and green government tartan kilt from which it got its name, The Black Watch was renowned as one of the great fighting regiments of the Britsh Army and served with distinction in all major conflicts from the War of Austrian succession onwards. In a highly controversial move, the regiment served under the operational control of the US Army during the counter-insurgency war in Iraq in December 2004.

The Black Watch prided itself on being a 'family regiment', with sons following fathers into its ranks, and this new concise history reflects the strong sense of identity which was created over the centuries. In 2006, as part of a radical review of the country's defence policy, The Black Watch was amalgamated into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. This new account of the famous regiment is therefore a timely memorial to its long and distinguished history.

'Over the years, millions of native Scots have left their home country but, until now, they have been written about only in general terms. SCOTTISH EXODUS breaks new ground by taking a set of emigrants, by the name of MacLeod, and, with the help of their descendants, investigating exactly what happened to them. These people began as Scots but became, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters, Irish priests, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, Aboriginal activists and Nova Scotian farmers. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. This groundbreaking account of Scotland's worldwide diaspora is based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories. It is also based on the author's international travels in the company of today's MacLeods - some of them still in Scotland, others in countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, New Zealand and South Africa. SCOTTISH EXODUS is a tale of horror and hardship, disastrous voyages, famine and dispossession: the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their global journeys began

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