WHEN lawyers turn to crime, the results can be spectacularly messy � women murdered, children abducted and money laundered, all leading to a bloody shoot-out.

WHEN lawyers turn to crime, the results can be spectacularly messy - women murdered, children abducted and money laundered, all leading to a bloody shoot-out.

This, at any rate, is what happens when Gary Moffat, a partner in one of Scotland's leading law firms, launches a side-career as a crime novelist.

His debut, Daisychain, launched at the Aye Write! Festival yesterday, has been chosen as Scottish Book of the Month for March by two leading book chains.

"Substantial" orders have been received for the international edition, and the European translation rights have been sold.

More than that, Daisychain has already led to the publisher commissioning a sequel from Gary - or G J Moffat, as the book's cover has it.

Daisychain is a fast-paced tale of corporate greed and murder, set across three days in the life of Logan Finch.

Finch is a city lawyer in his early 30s, on the eve of the biggest, most lucrative deal of his career and, further down the line, with a shot of becoming a partner in his firm.

Things are looking good, so naturally the fates are piling up some unpleasant surprises for him.

Unknown to Logan, the woman who is the love of his life, whom he has not seen for 12 years, has not only returned to Glasgow, but she has been murdered.

Her 11-year-old daughter, Ellie, has been abducted by the killers.

Logan finds out the hard way that Ellie is his. Aided by a friendly American-born client who has a private armoury, and a grimly efficient way of tracking people down, Logan sets out to claim her back.

"I feel incredibly lucky not only to have achieved success in getting published, but also in having a publisher in Hachette so enthusiastically supporting it," says Gary.

There are, not surprisingly, some similarities between Logan and his creator.

"I grew up in Ayrshire, came from a working class family, had a very straightforward upbringing, was the first one to go to university, all that sort of stuff," said Gary, who is still in his 30s, if only for another week or two.

"I grew up with the traditional Scottish work ethic and that has always stayed with me."

Like Gary in his younger, more carefree days, Finch was in the habit of going to loud, exuberant gigs at the Barrowlands.

Finch lives in a plush flat in the Pinnacle building in Bothwell Street, a law book's throw from the modern glass-fronted building occupied by Gary's employer, Burness.

Its many current projects include trawling the world in search of breaches of copyright relating to Kelvingrove's world-famous Dali painting.

"There is a lot of autobiographical stuff in the book," he adds.

"But I have to stress not everything that happens in the book happened to me.

"My dad was over the other night and was reading it. He came to one section and looked up and said, You never told me about a ned swinging a glass at you in a pub and getting into a fight'.

"I think he assumed everything in it had happened - which, thank God, it hasn't."

Gary's legal career started after university, at a practice in Kilwinning, Ayrshire.

"There were two partners, it was a really small outfit. We did legal aid, which meant criminals. There were divorce, adoption, custody matters.

"There were Saturday night breaches of the peace outside the pub, and the occasional doormen who had got a wee bit heavy-handed with people not behaving themselves.

"It was, in reality, very dull, boring, depressing stuff. Working in a criminal practice in Kilwinning was not like LA Law."

In time, he cut back on the boring stuff, and by the time he relocated to Glasgow, he was specialising in civil litigation and commercial matters.

He has been with Burness for 13 years, is head of its restructuring and insolvency practice, and his dispute resolution skills are valued by his clients. "It has changed a lot in that time," he says of his employers.

"When I joined, the Glasgow and Edinburgh offices were both in townhouses. It was a very traditional sort of business, with lots of private clients.

"But all of that has gone. Both offices are now in big, commercial, shiny glass buildings, and there is more of a focus on commerciality.

"That said, the general ethos has remained the same. It has just become a more commercially focused, better-run, efficient - some might say ruthlessly efficient - law firm. But they are all like that now."

So much for his day job. How does a highly-paid city lawyer come to dabble a toe in the waters of fiction writing - and contemporary crime fiction at that?

"The notion to write the book came before the idea about what to write about," he begins.

"In English exams at school I always wrote a creative writing essay. I never did a discursive or descriptive essay in my life.

"At university, and in my early working life, I would write, on the computer, little bits and pieces. If I had the idea for a scene, I would write it, but it would never go anywhere.

"In 2000 our first daughter was born. I was feeling kind of settled in my professional life and I thought, right, let's see if I can actually do this.

"I love the old Universal monster movies, the idea of a big fight against some monster, and I also loved the crime genre, so I wondered, Why don't I combine them?'.

"It was going to be a cop investigating what seemed to be serial killings, which turned out to be the work of a pack of werewolves."

"It sounds slightly embarrassing now," he concedes, "but it was just a notion to get me started."

The book evolved into a serial killer story set in Denver, Colorado.

A London literary agent hawked it round the big publishing houses, narrowly failing to get it accepted.

"The agent then said, Why don't you write something set in Scotland, where you're from?'"

The result, many months later, is Daisychain, in which Logan, Gary's resourceful alter ego, is willing to sacrifice everything to find the daughter he never knew he had.

"It is one of the weirdest feelings in the world, seeing your book in the shops,"

says the author.

"It has been such a long process, getting this book written, edited and published, dealing with the artwork. You don't get an epiphany where it just lands on your doormat.

"But, yes, it is incredibly exciting, and I have been a bit of a sad geek and been down to the book shops and stood for five minutes to see if anyone buys it."

It is strangely reassuring to know even high-powered lawyers have their weak moments ...

• Daisychain is published by Hachette Scotland at £12.99.