Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

$26.24

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Angus King

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 8 hours 9 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well.

A twenty-nine-year-old man lives alone in his Glasgow flat. The telephone rings; a casual conversation, but behind this a job offer. The clues are there if you know to look for them. He is an expert. A loner. Freelance. Another job is another job, but what if this organization wants more?

A meeting at a club. An offer. A target: Lewis Winter, a necessary sacrifice that will be only the first step in an all-out war between crime syndicates the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades. It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well. People who do it well know this. People who do it badly find out the hard way. The hard way has consequences.

Malcolm Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy has been nominated for several international prizes. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter was shortlisted for the Edgar Awards' Best Paperback Original, the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. How a Gunman Says Goodbye won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. Mackay was born in Stornoway on Scotland's Isle of Lewis, where he still lives.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

"[Mackay's] Glasgow Trilogy is classic . . . The subject is organized crime, but it's the author's blunt eloquence that matters. Don't pick up a Mackay book unless you've got spare time. They're habit-forming."โ€”Janet Maslin, New York Times "Glasgow's a tough city and this is a tough book . . . very authentic, very gritty, you can really feel the streets. They call this genre Tartan Noir and absolutely The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter is a first class member of that."โ€”Lee Child "A remarkably original debut . . . this is a book that it would be hard not to finish in one sitting . . . a wholly believable and unnerving portrait of organised crime."โ€”Observer "Exhilarating, canny and strikingly original ... Mackay is less interested in violence than in the insides of his vivid characters' heads, including those of a police detective and the sad-sack victim. Darting seamlessly in and out of those heads, Mackay reveals their thoughts (sometimes dumb, sometimes shrewd) as they jockey for position in a complex power struggle. Remarkable."โ€”Adam Woog, Seattle Times "It's been a long time since so many pages went by so fast .... Mackay is a natural storyteller [with] a voice to which we're happy to surrender. Surprisingly rewarding .... a thriller trilogy that thrills. "โ€”Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post "A welcome, hard-hitting addition to the tartan noir genre . . . It's easy to write a crime novel; it's hard to write a crime novel well. And this unrelenting look at the grimy underbelly of Glasgow's criminal underworld does it very well."โ€”Library Journal (starred) "Tartan noir fans will be satisfied."โ€”Publishers Weekly "Remarkable. Mackay's achievement is all the more stunning because drawing on his sublime imagination and innate empathy he has created a cast of characters so vivid - especially MacLean, who knows how hard it is to kill a man - that they live on in the memory long after the final page."โ€”Daily Mail "A quietly absorbing gangland tale, full of moral ambiguities."โ€”The Times Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting