Scottish Crime Fiction With Art/Heart, THE GOLDENACRE by Philip Miller

In a collaboration with Penguin, Soho Crime has now brought out an American printing of THE GOLDENACRE, a deeply mournful novel of art crime and greed, set in today's Edinburgh, Scotland. Denise Mina, the doyen of "tartan noir," calls the book a riveting, brutal journey into the high stakes world of inherited art and wealth, and it can certainly be read that way. But if your season allows time to enter Philip Miller's novel slowly, there is a wealth of literary depth to savor as well.

Two principal points of view dominate: that of sardonic reporter Shona Sandison, seeing her lifelong career at the Edinburgh Post melting away as digital platforms take over the news business, and that of the rather ineffective Thomas Tallis, designated to authenticate the provenance of a work of art called "The Goldenacre." The painting, fabulously valuable, is being donated to the Scottish government in lieu of back taxes owed by the mansion-rich, cash-poor family that owns it. Thomas needs to verify that it's really "the last precious work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the artist and architect" -- and sign off on the deal.

But Thomas is hesitant, uncertain, a weak reed in many ways. Which makes him almost the total opposite of his father, Sir Raymond T. Tallis, former deputy director of MI6. 

Thomas Tallis hasn't had much of his father's attention, and he's not getting family support right now, either. In fact, despite a small son in common, his wife seems to be divorcing him and taking the boy, and Thomas is doing nothing about it, despite enormous pain and grief. Slowly this comes into focus as a parallel to the wistfulness of the painting -- which portrays a pastoral area of Edinburgh still known as the Goldenacre. So when a hint of impropriety reaches him about the painting, this too is something he fails to take much action on.

Shona Sandison, though, is already linking the pieces, including the death (murder?) of a local artist, and the mysterious circumstances behind Thomas's recent change of jobs.

And then poor Thomas receives a very threatening message in the form of a human body part.

His collapse comes amid shimmering descriptions of Edinburgh, where he'd lived as a child. When he finds himself needing a drink, he knows to abandon the modern commercial part of the city:

There had been a place he had gone to as a boy. He would go there: the bend in the river. In the town where he had been sent to school, there were woods that followed the river up to its source A mile outside the town, the river—wide and slow—slowly turned. There was a beach on the slow side of the bend, and a broken viaduct. There, the shadows of the trees plunged into moving water and oaks grew. There was cool shade in the summer, and in winter the river ran swollen, and covered the shingle beach. He dreamt of it often.

Stepping back into his dreams, Thomas loses his grasp on the threats around him, and what to do about them. It's just as well, considering what takes place when the paired movements of this art investigator and the investigative journalist put pressure onto the major crime being organized around them.

There are several strands to the book's conclusion, and one might quibble with the forcing of some aspects. Yet it's undeniably a powerful and enjoyable read, and places Miller among the must-read authors who bind the tragedy of their crimes to Scotland's cities and feudal history.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

New Denise Mina Lifts Scottish (Glasgow) Noir to New Power: THE LESS DEAD

 [Originally published in New York Journal of Books]

“Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner.”

Denise Mina has written two crime fiction series set in Glasgow, Scotland, establishing memorable investigators. The Less Dead is a stand-alone, also set in Glasgow, and circles around one bizarre situation: Dr. Margo Dunlop is pregnant, so she finally wants to know something about her own unknown mother. To her astonishment, as she tackles hoeing out the house where she’d grown up, raised by a loving adoptive mother, she finds a stash of letters addressed to her and never delivered. Letters from her birth mother’s sister, that is, Margo’s aunt, Nikki.

The first meeting with Nikki takes place at an agency that facilitates such reconnection. It’s an ordinary place, with an ordinary enough counselor, a bit over the top in her staged sympathy for Margo, but otherwise tame enough. Once Nikki walks in the door, though, all ordinary moments vanish from Margo’s life in a terrifying sweep of “the past isn’t even past.”

It turns out Margo’s mother was a murder victim, probably caught up in swapping sex for drugs at the time. And all these years, her aunt Nikki—sister of the murder victim, Susan—has been pleading (those undelivered letters, remember?) for Margo to help track down the murderer and avenge the murder at last.

Not so fast. An educated professional, Margo has no intention of being dragged into some crackpot scheme by the obviously eccentric and low-class Nikki. Still, now that she knows a little, she can’t resist looking up more, and even finds a crime photo online:

Margo has dissected corpses. She has removed and weighed livers and lungs. She isn’t shocked by the sight of death or injury but she isn’t ready for Susan’s vulnerability and how young she is. She’s small for nineteen, childlike, and dead and dumped … No one was punished for this. They did this to a young woman and they’re still out there, walking around, eating biscuits, drinking tea. having Christmases. She feels the injustice of it deep in her gut, the way Nikki must have for decades, a cross between fear and nausea. It’s wrong.

It’s not surprising that Margo, despite her revulsion, begins to think she ought to do something. But in a terrifying turn of the tables, she finds that opening the door to look into her past has made her the object of someone else’s threats and hatred. Is it an unrelated creep of some sort? Or does it have something directly to do with the pervert who killed her mother?

Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner. Take the tender parts when they come, as Margo must: realizations of friendships, alliances across class lines despite not wanting them, friendships among women strong enough to fight off the men on hand, whether they are uselessly well-meaning or frighteningly violent.

There’s nothing pretty about reading The Less Dead. And it’s the slowly growing desperation that Margo finally embraces, for some kind of justice for her mother and for her own safety, that pulls the book forward. Still, Mina continues to offer the distaff side of the looking-glass world that began with the classic Glasgow noir of the late William McIlvanney: Crime always involves women, whether as victims, partners, or even perpetrators. In Mina’s capable hands, they raise their voices and speak out. At last.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

Brief Mention: Denise Mina, BLOOD SALT WATER

Dave and I mourned the death, earlier this month, of William McIlvanney, a Scottish crime writer whose work forms the classic bedrock of "tartan noir." McIlvanney's grim and gritty police procedurals laid out the conflicts of Scottish urban life and criminal investigation, including the perilous thread that complicates each investigation: that the criminal and the investigator may know each other already .... and may even be family.

This danger of "life in a small nation" provides a dark and disturbing undercurrent for investigator Alex Morrow in Denise Mina's newest Glasgow crime novel, BLOOD SALT WATER. The four earlier books in the series, most poignantly The Red Road, establish Morrow as a feisty and smart Detective Inspector in the Scottish police, with a half-brother who's a vicious career criminal. Morrow's already had to defend her family and her own career from the backwash of Danny's crimes and colleagues. Did you ever wish a family member would just, umm, die? Hard to blame Alex for the occasional thought.

That terrible sense of family shattered into unmatching pieces -- by lifestyle, religion, and money -- caroms among the criminals in BLOOD SALT WATER. Moreoever, Mina's insight deftly portrays the struggles of small-time crooks trying to avoid becoming hard cases -- as well as the manipulation and power of those who run the show.

Powerful, well paced, engaging, and dark (although not especially gory) -- the book's already been on many "best of the year" lists, and deserves it. Best option: Read the other four books first, for added depth. But if you don't have time just now, go right ahead into this newest. Mina's such a pro that you won't feel you've missed out. Let me know what you think, once you've reached the end.

Denise Mina, THE RED ROAD: Alex Morrow #4, Gritty and Deep

A murder from 1997 -- solved but not really cleared away -- is going to dog Detective Inspector Alex Morrow's current effort to keep a mobbed-up murderer jailed in Glasgow. But she doesn't know it yet, as RED ROADS opens with her court testimony and an unlikely stirring of friendship with Anton Atholl, defense attorney for the notorious Michael Brown. In fact, it's Alex who's sweating and nervous in court this time, but she pulls herself together and does a competent job of testimony.

Back at her boss's office, a shocking discovery threatens to completely derail the case, though. The incarcerated defendant's fingerprints have just been identified -- at a current crime scene. Word of this could do much more than let Michael Brown off his current charges; it could derail all the past convictions related to him, as well as to the prints lab.

Mina ramps up the tension and emotion by exposing the reader, in chapters sandwiched between Alex's experience, to what took place when a 16-year-old sexually abused girl went to prison back in 1997 for a knifing murder -- on the same night that another such murder took place. It will be a long reach within the book's tense timeline until DI Alex Morrow realizes that there are people from the old case, tangentially involved with the new one.

This is the fourth Alex Morrow investigation (although it appears the publisher has "issues" around title number three and isn't mentioning it; go to the author website for the full listing, http://www.denisemina.com/writing). If you're already hooked on Mina's Glasgow noir, this one may be a hair gentler in terms of gore than others -- but emotionally it packs multiple punches and captures the double-binds of poverty and deprivation that feed back into cruelty. And if you haven't yet sampled Mina's other titles (which also include other investigators), this is actually a really good place to start, rich with imagery and layers of connection. I was sorry to turn the last page.