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 home insists that they don’t know anyone named Bob. The thugs refuse to believe them and, since Bob isn’t available, they kidnap the family’s elderly father instead, this after Pat accidentally shoots

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 on the wrong side of the tracks. When her commander assigns the lead in a volatile kidnapping to her loathed male colleague, she feels slighted about that, too. As the case gets more complex, she deci...

I thought this was fairly decent up until the end when it all fell apart for me and I was left feeling like I'd eaten something that was fine at the time but left an unpleasant aftertaste.The reader was cracking me up, though not intentionally. She sounded like she'd burnt the tip of her tongue and was trying to work around saying words that would cause her pain. At least, that's what I imagined had happened and it amused me greatly for absolutely no reason at all. I'm just weird, sometimes.This...

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 and trying to find her place in the world. She juggles all this with a kidnapping...an absolutely goofy love interest between a perpetrator and a victim that she somehow manages to make us feel sympa...

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 vicious and hourly, streets were graffiti-declared Free States, and the children's language would have made a porn star blush.Much in Alex Morrow's life is, like parts of the Glasgow she sees, a bit on...

This was my first exposure to the author, who apparently scored much praise for her debut novel. This one I have to say disappointed sufficiently to perhaps put me off attempting another. Certainly it captured the hopeless, gray, damp and seedy Scottish underworld. Wonderfully graphic images of council tenements, flaking paintwork and dead flowers in the garden but where was the story? The devil as they say is in the detail and to me the detail was misplaced. Of the numerous threads through the

I'd heard Tartan Noir thrown about and found this definition from the Double Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary: "Scottish detective fiction, or Tartan Noir as it’s called, with its brooding sensibility, brutal humor and fixation on the nature of guilt and punishment, has more in common with the Russian novel than it does with traditional detective writing." Set in Glasgow, Still Midnight falls within this umbrella of Tartan Noir with the flawed detective hero, Alex Morrow.Alex Morrow, is prickly,

I realized a few months ago that I'd missed several releases from Denise Mina. But I mistakenly thought the Alex Morrow series was the Paddy Meehan series and started about 3 books in. Luckily you can do any Alex Morrow book as a standalone, but I've gone back and read them all out of order, with this first one as my 4th. I actually think I did read this one before, it felt familiar, but I had forgotten basically everything so I got to enjoy it all over again.Definitely one of the strongest Alex...

"Transcending the genre" implies something backhanded about "the genre" and i am a big fan of the genre. Denise Mina is a big star of the genre and I'm a big fan of hers so I expected something great with this book. What I didn't expect was how great it was going to be. It starts off very straightforward but as it progresses the spotlight of the story seems to pull back and illuminate the depths of all the characters tangled in the plot. It's here that Mina shines even brighter with writing that...

I really hate to add another book to my "can't finish 2014" shelf so soon, but I have no interest in this book. It's rather clumsily written and I'm not interested in the crime, the police officers, anything. Some of the problem is the point of view switches between the criminals and the main officer, Alex Morrow. Since I already know who did the crime (if not exactly why), I'm not so interested in watching the police find the culprits. If an author is going to tell me right up front who did wha...

I really enjoyed this book! It's a mystery set in Glasgow with a grumpy police woman as the main character. It reminded me of books by two other mysteries from across the pond-Tana French and Kate Atkinson. But while both French and Atkinson's main characters and their personal stories tend to dominate the books, this one alternated between Alex Morrow, the policewoman, and some of the people involved in the crime. I liked knowing what was going on with the criminals, one of them I thought was p...

Oh, to write this well!One book by Denise Mina, and I am a fan. Delightful juxtapositions of humor and despair, with uncanny characterizations, and an absolutely wicked way with words--Mina has everything I want in a police procedural. The descriptions of the city are so detailed that I felt as if I could see, hear, feel, taste, and smell each room. Protagonist Alex Morrow is intriguing. Mina wisely feeds readers pieces of the Morrow puzzle, leaving us eager to discover more in the next installm...

Told through the frame of a home invasion gone wrong, Mina's complex narrative is a less crime story than it is an intricate and thoughtful probing of family life, workplace politics,and the inescapable organizing structure of the past on identity and life choices.

3 storylines: crime, romance, workplace — l-o-n-g novel, a writer you like or not, no mid-ground. Profanity, torture scenes (crime and workplace - I wanted to tell her coworker a thing or two!). Narrated well with a heavy accent so keep reader at normal speed till you get accustomed.

I'm looking forward to reading more in this series. One strange thing...it is as if someone made a bet with the author that she couldn't mention "toast" in every chapter, and she said, "hold my beer". Honestly. Toast is mentioned constantly. Maybe that's a Scottish thing?

I read this book in 2009 and remembered none of it. Not that it was immemorable but I tend to forget most mystery/police procedural plot details. This is the first Alex Morrow novel by Mina. I love the gritty Glasgow these novels portray and the character Morrow as well.A group of Glasgow thugs invade the home in a modest neighborhood. When they don't find the person they are looking for, they snatch the father, a 60 year old Muslim shopkeeper. A family member is shot in the melee and Morrow com...

I enjoyed Mina's Garnethill trilogy in the early 00's, but then let her fall off my radar. Why, Jannie, why?!? Still Midnight is the first of what are now five (I think) crime novels starring Glasgow detective Alex Morrow, and it is everything I want in a mystery, including a complex (and, OK, troubled) protagonist and a character-driven plot that pays more attention to family & sociopolitical dynamics than serial killers and gore. I'm definitely in for more of Mina.

London Road Police Station was down the road from Bridgeton Cross... The door was always open to the public, welcoming them into an empty lobby with freestanding poster displays of friendly policemen and women chortling happily. For safety reasons the front bar wasn't manned. The duty sergeant could see the lobby through a one-way mirror and CCTV. He came out in his shirtsleeves if the member of the public didn't look tooled up or mad with the drink, but if they had as much as an air of melancho...

I listened to the audiobook as well as had the written book and this was just a confusing book. I can say that now that I'm done with the book that I really have no idea why the events happened nor understand the ending. The audiobook is read by a narrator with an extremely heavy Scottish accent which was very difficult to understand. So because I don't understand the book, plot, or ending I have to give this book 1 star, and that's even reading along in the actual book when things got really co...