With the Garnethill trilogy, her Paddy Meehan novels and now the DI Alex Morrow series, Denise Mina has established herself as one of the most interesting and uncompromising writers in the crime genre. The fifth and latest Morrow novel, Blood, Salt, Water, can only confirm her preeminence in the field. In Mina’s novels, killers are not malign geniuses but incompetent and damaged thugs, the line between innocence and victimhood is blurred, and misogyny is not a shocking abnormality but a perpetual white noise. Blood, Salt, Water begins with a flourish of defiance against the norms of the crime novel. In Helensburgh, a touristy Scottish town once the home to a quarter of the country’s millionaires, Iain Fraser, a recently released convict, murders a young woman on the orders of a local crime boss, making the “who” part of “whodunit” fairly otiose. In Glasgow, DI Morrow – whose gangster half-brother was sent to prison in a previous instalment – is investigating the disappearance of Roxanna Fuentecilla, a woman who seems to be involved with Ecuadorian money-laundering. But the connections between the murder and the disappearance are more knotty and convoluted than the reader initially suspects.
Mina’s descriptions of small-town Scotland in the run-up to the referendum are exquisitely precise. She captures how the artisan bread-selling returnee moaning about losing custom to Waitrose sits cheek by jowl with the chippy never-left town drug dealer. Mina catches that oppressive sense that no one can play six degrees of separation in Scotland: you always get there in less than four. There is a simmering tension surrounding the independence debate, not so much in terms of the characters’ different hopes for the outcome but in the subtle, micro-negotiations that take place as people try to fathom each other’s voting intentions.
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