Denise Mina - The Less Dead

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Mina's best

Denise Mina is a brilliant writer and I have loved much of her work, but I don’t think The Less Dead is one of her best.

Margo, a Glasgow GP, was adopted at a few days old and has now arranged to meet the sister of her birth mother in order to find out more about her background. This leads Margo into dark territory among Glasgow’s heroin addicts, sex workers and also sparks some very sinister threats to her personally.

Mina, as always, writes very well, but overall I found the book rather unsatisfactory. It opens with a long passage in which Margo, is waiting to meet her birth mother’s siter, who is very late. A lot of pages pass before she finally appears, which rather sets the tone of the book, in which not much happens for pretty long periods. There’s a great deal of atmospheric scene-setting and exploration of Margo’s internal state, which Denise Mina does exceptionally well, of course, and a very good, insightful and compassionate portrait of the life of sex workers and people’s attitudes to them, but it’s all within a structure which didn’t really work for me.

It turns out that Margo’s mother was an addict and a sex worker who was murdered. Gradually it emerges that someone is stalking Margo and that they know a great deal about her mother’s killing. This too is quite well done, but there are so many other fragmented plot strands that the whole thing seemed a bit of a mess to me. There’s an unrelated story about a friend in an abusive relationship, which may be intended to illustrate aspects of the main story but to me just seemed to be a major distraction. There are some red herrings which didn’t really convince at all and, frankly, I found it a bit of a mess.

I’m sorry to be critical of a very fine writer whose work I usually love, but I can only give this one a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Harvill, Secker for an ARC via NetGalley.)