A young woman is awoken in the home of her recently departed mother by a couple of teenage boys who seem to have a bone to pick with her. Though it soon becomes clear that they are picking the wrong bone, the woman finds herself in grave danger and makes her bid for freedom. Sadly for her, she doesn’t make it and the boys lose control as they stamp out all of her facial features.DS Alex Morrow is sent along to investigate. What the reader picks up from the early encounters with Morrow is that sh...

SPOILER ALERT***We never doubted that she would catch him. She being DS Alex Morrow of the Glasgow polis and him being Thomas, one of two culprits known to us from the beginning of the novel. In fact, we meet Thomas first, see him and his friend Squeak as they kill and follow Thomas and his thoughts in the days after.Two stories: that of the Scottish woman detective and that of the young son of a wealthy and powerful man, Thomas who is also the killer. The book begins with the funeral of DS Morr...

I feel I gave this book a fair chance. First time I tried to read it had to put it down and read another book where I could follow the plot. Came back to it, had to put it down, read reviews by other readers, then tried again. Now if I construct enough two-word sentences you might get a sense of the rhythm of the book. Is it the planned intent of author to present helter/skelter thinking and actions or lack thereof without framework of reason? I had nothing to hold on to here.Maybe the character...

This book is what I would call an intelligent police procedural. It is not a "who done it," rather, a "why done it," as the criminals' identities are known to the reader from the start. They are portrayed as three dimensional characters, not slavering, psychopathic rabid dogs, but people with past, present, and future lives. And while the author does not seek sympathy for them from the reader, her humanizing them makes it difficult not to empathize with them, though never as a reason to excuse t...

Every other book which I have previously read and rated 5* ought to be forthwith down-graded to a 3* in order to put this amazing novel into a class of its own!This novel is extremely impressive and powerful on many levels.... Graphically (wasps), symbolically, as a psychological study, as a comment on social behaviour, on relationships both professinal and familial. Interest is compounded by the contrasts and comparisons highlighted in the characters from different geographical regions where ev...

With great quotes on the cover from Ian Rankin and The Guardian promising an exciting read, I was looking forward to reading The End of the Wasp Season. However, I came away disappointed.The book starts off with the thrill of moments leading up to the kill. The first chapter is tense and gripping, but I thought the story lost it’s grip from there. I couldn’t make up my mind… There were times when I thought the story was going slow and I didn’t find it engaging, but then at other times I found my...

Denise Mina gives a blow-by-blow analysis of who the victims of the UK's financial crisis are, from the perspective of a pregnant detective in Glasgow who grew up in difficult circumstances. The difference between Mina's excellent book and say OR THE BULL KILLS YOU is that Mina includes relevant psychological details rather than writing a relatively superficial film treatment. Here DI Morrow has a hard time getting her staff to take seriously the grisly murder of a call girl; as she doggedly pur...

I'm an admirer of Denise Mina's writing, and I wish I could have given this larger praise, but I felt the ending was a bit anticlimactic and not quite as shocking as I think she meant it to be.In this novel, Glasgow detective Alex Morrow is pregnant and faced with the brutal slaying of a young woman in her recently deceased mother's house. Her face has been obliterated by someone stomping on her, and bloody tennis shoe footprints abound. In the home's kitchen, police discovered several hundred t...

I enjoyed the development of Alex Morrow here. Yes the story is gruesome, gripping and has a strong police procedural element, however this is more than a crime story. The key focus is on characters, psychology and the impact of parents on child development. I thought the story needed some editing or adjustment in the first part of the book - there were elements that I had to re-read and had me scratching my head - but it improved and I already have the next in the series ready to read.

The reader is present at the extremely suspenseful opening scene of this book which culminates in a brutal murder. We know who “did it” and watch while Scottish Detective Alex Morrow, female and pregnant with twins, patiently reconstructs the crime. The disturbing “why” of the crime is at the crux of this novel and Mina reveals this by developing strong, complex characters and exposing the psychological motivations behind their actions. (Fathers do not come off particularly well in this book).Se...

I'm just going to keep listening to Denise Mina's Alex Morrow series on audio until the end of time if that's okay with everyone. These books are so solid. This one in particular, which had teenage killers (not a spoiler, you know it from the first chapter) got in one boy's head so well and was so perfectly accurate that it was really uncanny. And the narration was excellent to boot.I have a post brewing about violence against women in crime novels and how much I dislike it. (Yes, CAREER OF EVIL...

Sarah Erroll is brutally murderd by gawky teenage boys after recognizing one of them. Her life comes under a microscope: her questionable lifestyle, and care for her deceased mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. DS Alex Morrow os celed to sort things out, and there are many suspects, including a school friend of hers, who was the mother's primary caretaker. One of the boys, Thomas Anderson, is told that his father Lars has hung himself, to avoid responsibiilty for his sleazy business d...

Denise Mina is beginning to fill the void left by Ruth Rendell’s death. She is, as of now, my favorite living crime writer. Mina brings enormous depth to her characters and her plots are messy, complicated, and thoroughly believable. If you want a fast-paced thriller, Mina is not for you. She takes her time, building character as well as plot, in a highly skilled manner. She is cerebral and literary, while simultaneously laying out plots that are visceral and sometimes gruesome, but always top-n...

Denise Mina is amazing. Like many others who write mysteries or crime novels, she gets sidelined in that genre. But really, she just writes amazing novels that happen to involve a murder. In this one you actually know who did it within the first chapter, but that doesn't stop you from wanting to know so much more about how and why. Like the late, great Ruth Rendell (and while their styles are different), Mina delivers on plotting and characters and all of it. Very excited to read more by her!

Whenever I feel a reading slump, I pick a murder mystery. This book was among the best crime books recommended in a blog and it was also a Gold dagger award nominee. And I got a cheap copy on Amazon. That would explain why I would suddenly pick a Scottish author out of nowhere - just in case you are interested :)The murder happens in chapter 1 and the murderers are known to the reader in chapter 2. And the story tracks in alternate chapters what is happening with the killer and how the police is...

The second in the Alex Morrow series, THE END OF THE WASP SEASON is a book that it would be possible to read before the earlier. The opening chapters of the book introduces the reader to the three women at the centre of this story - DS Alex Morrow, Kay Murray who worked for Sarah Erroll and Sarah herself, 24 years old, murdered in a house that she rarely used.Somehow, however, the focus of the book seems to be Lars Anderson, millionaire banker, disgraced financier, suicide hanging himself from a...

In Glasgow, a young woman, still grieving the death of her mother only a few short months previously, is brutally murdered, seemingly at random. DS Alex Morrow who is five months pregnant with twins, is called in to investigate the murder, and even the hardened cops have trouble coping with the horror of Sarah’s last few minutes.With the investigation bringing up more questions than answers, Alex is discovering a tangled web of lies that are becoming harder to untangle! Her own past is threateni...

I really enjoyed Denise Mina's second novel with the central character, Alex Morrow. If you enjoy police procedural novels then this book is for you. I enjoyed the storyline and I felt more of a connection to Alex Morrow. The book could've been shortened just a bit. Other than that it was a really great read.

There’s a gruesome murder and we know who did it but not why. The “polis” are distracted by their own internal politics and it’s difficult for DS Morrow, who is 5 months pregnant with twins, to get her team to concentrate on the investigation especially as her boss seems frustratingly intent on barking up the wrong tree. Denise Mina populates her story with a cast of unlikeable but well drawn characters and, rather against my will I gradually began to empathise with some of them if not to the po...

Mina writes Scottish mysteries that are deeply reflective of class and family dysfunction and often deeply moving. This one is another winner.