The End of the Wasp Season (Alex Morrow 2) [Paperback]

What I like about Denise Mina's writing is that she doesn't judge her characters, or write about them condescendingly -her characters are not 'good' or 'bad', and all have their reasons for acting the way that they do. As she showed in the Garnethill trilogy (highly recommended), Mina is acutely attuned to characters' mental states and this creates a multi-layered and complex cast of people who all play some part in how the narrative unfolds. She humanises characters, whether the perpetrators of the crime or the victim whose death kickstarts the narrative. The victim is often underwritten and underdeveloped in crime fiction -the reader usually encounters them after death, when all that can be offered up are bland platitudes from friends and colleagues (something that exasperates DS Alex Morrow when she is trying to get a sense of the dead woman's personality). But in 'The End of the Wasp Season', Morrow's attempts to piece together something of the victim, to add a human dimension to get her team interested (class and profession distance the dead woman from the people investigating her death), render the dead woman lifelike once again. There are a couple of sequences where we experience Sarah Erroll as she was in life (through recordings that are listened to / watched by Morrow, or someone who really knew her), and she is humanised: "It struck Morrow very suddenly: Kay was right. Sarah Erroll wasn't just a battered jigsaw puzzle. She was a young lassie and she was dead. It was sad."
The other aspect that sets Mina apart is that the police investigation (and the character of Morrow) is only one facet of the narrative; chapters alternate between different points of view, such as the perpetrator, and others who find their lives touched by the impact of the crime (it doesn't simply go back and forth between police and perpetrator -there is a sense of the ripple effect that a crime and its aftermath have). I read an interview with Mina recently where she said that she is not much of a plotter, and admittedly the reader does know who committed the crime from early on in the book (it's not a whodunnit), but the way that people's lives are interwoven around events is skillfully done and I think that it makes the narrative more compelling.
The way that Mina structures the book around several characters means that you can't really describe Morrow as the protagonist because equal emphasis is given to others as well, but she is the route into the story for the reader. This is the second book to feature DS Alex Morrow, but you don't need to have read 'Still Midnight' first (although this book may pique your interest in the first book). I found 'The End of the Wasp Season' to be a compelling read.

Mina's second book about her Glaswegian DS heroine Alex Morrow put me strongly in mind of Larkin's famous lines about what your Mum and Dad do.

Here we have Alex, very pregnant (twins) working her way through the investigation of a murder. A very nasty murder. Alex cares about getting and outcome, but struggles to bring her team on board (explaining why would spoil the story). We know fairly early on who committed the crime, but not why. Learning why takes us on a journey through family life, dwelling in turn on Alex's nephew, son of the gangster brother whose connection to her is still a secret, on Alex's old friend Kay, struggling to raise her family of four in a Council flat and on Thomas, whose wealthy financier father, having ruined thousands with his schemes, hangs himself, leaving a vicious note for his wife. We see the various ways in which parents can muck up their children's lives - or build them up.

Mina has a great talent for sketching the awkward corners of lives, here delineating the factions in Morrow's police station: the unconfident Bannerman, promoted above his ability, polarising the officers under him and pushing for results. Or describing the uneasy relationship between Alex and Kay. In Alex Morrow, she has created a fascinating, complex woman, with her own failings and with a burden of guilt about her nephew. And there is Thomas's truly grotesque family, illustrating the old saying that if you want to know what God thinks of money, you should look at the people he gives it to.

I had been waiting for this book since reading Still Midnight, Morrow's first outing, and wasn't disappointed - this is, if anything, even better than the earlier volume and I'm glad to see that another is on the way Untitled Mina 1 of 3.

There was something about the style of writing that didn't work for me, hard to put my finger on it but I felt the narrative lacked flow and the plotting was jerky. I appreciate I am in a minority here as this is the first one star review and nor do I believe in saying don't buy this book. However, I didn't enjoy this book and will hesitate before reading any other by this author.