Still Midnight, Denise Mina
Still Midnight, Denise Mina
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Still Midnight

Author: Denise Mina

Narrator: Jane MacFarlane

Unabridged: 7 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 03/01/2010

Synopsis

Alex Morrow is not new to the police force—or to crime—but there is nothing familiar about the call she has just received. On a still night in a quiet suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, three armed men have slipped from a van into a house, demanding a man who is not, and has never been, inside the front door. In the confusion that ensues, one family member is shot and another kidnapped, the assailants demanding an impossible ransom. Is this the amateur crime gone horribly wrong that it seems, or something much more unexpected?

About Denise Mina

Denise Mina is the author of mystery, horror, and historical fiction. She has written novels for four series, as well as stand-alone novels and graphic novels. The Field of Blood won the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel, The Long Drop won the Gordon Burn Prize, and Garnethill.

About Jane MacFarlane

Jane MacFarlane was born and grew up in the West End of Glasgow. She studied the cello at RSAMD and RNCM and worked as a freelance cellist with orchestras and bands all over Britain. As well as playing and acting in theater, she has also been a composer and musical director, writer, and photographer. She spent three years at the Royal Shakespeare Company as an actress and musician, and she now lives in Central London.

Reviews

Goodreads review by James

This novel features a cast of tortured characters, some good, some bad, and others somewhere in between. It opens when two relatively incompetent thugs named Pat and Eddy burst into a home in Glasgow, intent on kidnapping some guy named Bob. But there’s no Bob there, and the panicked family in the h......more

Goodreads review by Steve

Mina's work is not for everyone. Her vicious, visceral style spews and spills across the page, messy as a first draft until you notice the control and subtlety hiding under the anger and violence. Alex Morrow is a Glasgow police detective coping with a crumbling marriage and her shame at growing up......more

Goodreads review by Carol

The story is skillfully woven around a handful of misshapen characters centered on Detective Alex Morrow. Alex is a woman of quiet some depth...full of contradictions trying to sort out the truth of her investigation...her boss and her fellow officers...along with her painful and sticky private life......more

Goodreads review by Thomas

London Road Police Station was down the road from Bridgeton Cross. Bridgeton was pretty, near the vast expanse of Glasgow Green, had a couple of listed buildings and a museum. For years it had been mooted as an up and coming area but Bridgeton stubbornly neither upped nor came. Drunken fights were v......more

Quotes

“Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant with the Strathclyde police force, is another of Mina’s prickly heroines, the kind you love at your own risk…She’s also the smartest cop in the shop, the only one sensitive enough to interpret the subtle vagaries of human behavior. It’s a huge pleasure to watch her crack the ‘family myths and fables’ that blood relatives instinctively adopt as protection from outsiders—and as a way of preserving themselves from members of their own clan.” New York Times

“[A] stellar first in a new series…Mina, who’s as much at ease with cops as she is with the people they chase, laces this potent crime thriller with colorful Scottish slang and delivers a sucker-punch climax.” Publishers Weekly

“Mina is adept at capturing the rhythms of life in Glasgow among the down-and-out. She vividly portrays the squalor of the underworld while depicting even her bad guys in all of their human complexity, which gives her novels a rare grace.” Library Journal

“A startling exploration of characters who stubbornly refuse to stay in the boxes they've been assigned.” Kirkus Reviews

“Mina is acutely sensitive to characters’ mental states, rendering them with a precision which blurs the line between heroism and villainy. At the same time, her prose is both nimble and muscular.” The Guardian

“The book really has everything you want in a crime novel: enormous suspense, acerbic wit, arresting detail, and an ever-mutating plot. But there is improbable sweetness here too. There is a word I would never have used to describe Denise Mina’s work until now; but the truth is, this intense, fast-moving crime drama is, in the end, utterly charming.” Barnesandnoble.com Review

“Mina shakes the tired format of the thriller until all the clichés come out…Still Midnight is both unsettling, exhilarating, [and] ferociously gripping.” The Independent

Awards

  • Barry Award
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