The Red Road

Starred review from February 24, 2014
Edgar-finalist Mina's fourth novel featuring Glasgow Det. Insp. Alex Morrow (after 2013's Gods and Beasts) is perhaps her finest yet, a brilliantly crafted tale of corruption, ruined lives, and the far-reaching ripple effects of crime. Morrow is called to testify against Michael Brown, a recidivist offender whose prints have been found on confiscated guns. During the trial, Brown's prints turn up at a brand new murder scene. Have they been somehow planted by Brown from prison in a ruse to discredit evidence? Morrow follows a complex trail that leads back to two murders in 1997. One of the murders involved a teenage girl, Rose Wilson, who stabbed her abusive pimp to death; the other was 14-year-old Michael Brown's brutal slaying of his older brother, John "Pinkie" Brown. Wilson now works for her benefactor, elderly attorney Julius McMillan, as a nanny for McMillan's grandchildren. Meanwhile, Robert, Julius's son, has gone missing after an elaborate money-laundering scheme has turned south. Are these decades' old crimes somehow connected? Morrow thinks so, but seeing the investigation through just might cost her the career she's fought so hard to achieve.

Starred review from February 15, 2014
Fourteen years after Princess Diana died in a Paris automobile accident, the date of her death still casts a long shadow over the Strathclyde Police, in the fourth book featuring detective Alex Morrow. Rose Wilson, already an experienced prostitute at 14, celebrates Diana's death by killing two of the many males who've used her: Pinkie Brown, the boy she dreams about from another group home, and her pimp, Sammy McCaig. Despite her apathetic confession, she's released after a short prison term to become the nanny to the household of Julius McMillan, the lawyer who schemed to shield her from a stiffer sentence for reasons of his own. The death of the long-ailing McMillan traumatically reopens his affairs. Rose, still in the family's employ, grieves over the only person who's ever shown her any kindness. McMillan's son, Robert, convinced that paid assassins are hunting him, runs off and leases a castle to die in. And detective Alexandra "Alex" Morrow--after testifying against Michael Brown, who's spent most of his life in prison ever since he was convicted of killing his older brother, Pinkie, in Rose's place--has to deal with the discovery of Brown's fingerprints at the demolition site where charitable organizer Aziz Balfour was killed three days ago, even though Brown, clapped up for months, has the best of all possible alibis. While fighting off the flirtatious advances of Brown's defense attorney, Alex racks her brain over possible ways Brown could have left his prints at a murder scene miles from his prison, as Mina (Gods and Beasts, 2013, etc.), conscientious to a fault, casually dispenses further calamities, from clinical depression to Parkinson's disease, among the cast. In addition to the usual indelible character studies, Mina provides the most compelling plot of Alex's four cases to date, with a new round of revelations that makes the Glasgow cops the most corrupt since Philip Marlowe looked under all those rocks in Bay City, Calif.

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Starred review from February 15, 2014
Prickly, unflinching DI Alex Morrow's (Gods and Beasts, 2013) career success is the result of delivering solid evidence, definitely not from political victories. She's single-mindedly focused on that delivery in her testimony against Michael Brown, who's accused of smuggling arms for a Glasgow money-laundering crew just a few short years after serving a sentence for murdering his brother, Pinkie. Moments after testifying, Morrow is notified that Brown's fingerprints have appeared at a fresh murder scene. Brown has been locked up, however, convincing Morrow that the new fingerprints are a maneuver to cast doubt on his current charges. Even so, all three cases involving Michael Brown rely on fingerprint evidence, so she'll have to sort out which case is corrupted to nail his conviction. As Morrow works backward toward Brown's 1997 murder arrest, Mina plays out the night of Pinkie's murder through cops, attorneys, and a young girl named Rose, who have all left their mark on Brown's story. Sharp, honest, and conflicted, Morrow is the kind of detective readers love, and they'll groan for her as she detects the too-familiar taint of corruption and as her personal connections to Glasgow's underworld create practical and emotional obstacles. Mina's at the top of her game here, deftly unveiling the sad truths of the past and present to create a gritty must-read for fans of complex, psychological police procedurals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2013

Police detective Alex Morrow testifies at the trial of truly nasty gun dealer Mark Lynch following an investigation that also hints at the assassination of a money-laundering Scottish lawyer. Note that the Stieg Larsson estate has chosen Mina to adapt the "Millennium Trilogy" for a graphic novel series and that The End of the Wasp Season was short-listed for the 2011 CWA Gold Dagger Award.

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