Review Roundup: Adler-Olsen, Anderson, Cahoon, Costantini, Cross, Daly, Hiekkapelto, Hjorth & Rosenfeldt, Johnstone, Mina, Sundstol

Here are eleven reviews which have been added to the Euro Crime website today, all have appeared on the blog since last time*.

*I am trialling a new approach at the moment in that all reviews will appear on the Euro Crime blog rather than being separate files as part of the Euro Crime website. I feel this will give the reviews more exposure and make them more findable in a search engine. The reviews will appear daily ie Monday to Friday, with roundups on Sundays. The website will continue with bibliographies etc, the only change is that the reviews will be on the blog.

I'd be interested in any comments about this new approach.

You can keep up to date with Euro Crime by following the blog and/or liking the Euro Crime Facebook page and follow on Twitter, @eurocrime.

New Reviews

Michelle Peckham reviews Jussi Adler-Olsen's Buried tr. Martin Aitken, the fifth in the Carl Morck and Assad series set in Copenhagen;

Amanda Gillies reviews Lin Anderson's The Special Dead, the eleventh in the Rhona Macleod series (check back on Tuesday for a Q & A with Lin);

Not Euro Crime, but as part of an occasional special feature, I review Lynn Cahoon's Guidebook to Murder, the first in a series set in a coastal Californian town;


Lynn Harvey reviews Roberto Costantini's The Root of all Evil tr. N S Thompson, the middle part of a projected trilogy;




Also set in America is Scottish author Mason Cross's The Samaritan, reviewed by Terry Halligan;

Terry also reviews Bill Daly's Double Mortice the second in the DCI Charlie Anderson series set in Glasgow;

Ewa Sherman reviews Kati Hiekkapelto's The Hummingbird tr. David Hackston which introduces Finland's Detective Anna Fekete;


Geoff Jones reviews Hjorth & Rosenfeldt's The Man Who Watched Women tr. Marlaine Delargy, the second in the Sebastian Bergman series;

Amanda also reviews The Jump by Doug Johnstone, and concludes "I am lost for superlatives to describe this book";

Michelle also reviews Denise Mina's Blood Salt Water, the fifth in the DS Alex Morrow series

and Laura Root reviews Vidar Sundstol's The Ravens tr. Tiina Nunnally, the conclusion to his Minnesota Trilogy.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, along with releases by year.

Review: Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina

Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina, July 2015, 304 pages, Orion, ISBN: 1409140741

Reviewed by Michelle Peckham.
(Read more of Michelle's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

Iain and Tommy take an unidentified woman out to some sand dunes, near Loch Lomond and murder her. As she dies, Iain sucks in her dying breath, as she seems to say the name ‘Sheila’, the name of his mother. He feels that he has sucked in her soul and it is now trapped inside him. Driving back after dumping her body in the Loch, he cannot shake the feeling that she is inside him. He looks at his hands, which have traces of watery blood, and remembers that his mother once told him that only salt water lifts blood. But they’d dumped the body in a fresh water loch. The effects on his psyche of committing his first ever murder, influence his behaviour throughout the book.

Alex Morrow, a detective based in Glasgow, is involved in a surveillance case, following someone called Roxanna. She is somehow involved in possible drug related activities/money laundering. But Roxanna disappears and the police don’t know where she has gone. One of her kids rings in anonymously to alert the police, and after confirming that it was one of the kids (through CCTV), this allows them to follow up her disappearance officially. But no one seems to know where she’s gone.

Boyd Fraser runs an organic, local farmer’s market café in Helensburgh. A woman called Susan Grierson turns up. Long years ago, Susan was Boyd’s Akela in the Scouts, and his first ever sailing instructor. She has been living in the USA for the last twenty years, and is just back following her mother’s death, to sort out her house.

These three strands set the scene for the story to unfold; the criminal suffering from a conscience, the unhappy and bored café owner, and Morrow’s drugs investigation. Sooner or later, all three storylines link up and as usual, Denise Mina cleverly weaves the three strands together. There is an insightful look into police politics and how they influence their investigation, the ‘dos and don'ts’, and the consequences of receiving rewards and attribution for catching criminals also wanted elsewhere. The real villain is right under everyone’s noses the whole time without anyone suspecting, and there is a satisfying conclusion to the story once the drama has played out. This is a full-fat story with plenty of plot, character development, insight and local colour. Beautifully written, lovely to read and highly recommended.

Michelle Peckham, August 2015

TV News: The Field of Blood returns

The second series of The Field of Blood, based on Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan series returns to BBC One on Thursday 8 August at 9pm and is a two-part adaptation of book two, The Dead Hour.

Read interviews with the cast and watch clips at the BBC website.

Tartan Noir on Open Book

Here's another podcast I missed until recently, where Dreda Say Mitchell interviews Allan Guthrie and Denise Mina and goes round Aberdeen with Stuart MacBride. Download it or listen to it at the Open Book website.

26 August 2012
"Dreda Say Mitchell presents a special Open Book programme on Tartan Noir, exploring the appeal of the Scottish crime novel. Glasgow based author Denise Mina joins Edinburgh writer and publisher Allan Guthrie to discuss the importance of place in this increasingly popular genre, while Stuart MacBride, writer of the DS Logan McRae books, takes us on a tour of his inspirational Aberdeen setting."

Graphic Novel of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Last year I mentioned that Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy would be turned into graphic novels. Each book will be made into two graphic novels (the same has happened with Twilight) and the first part of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will be out in November.

A special preview edition has been released, showing a few of the pages (drawings but no words) and I was able to download it at Edelweiss.

From Vertigo: "Crime author Denise Mina will write the book, with the cover image created by Lee Bermejo and art from Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti."

The Field of Blood - on BBC1 soon

The Field of Blood based on Denise Mina's book of the same name will be begin on BBC1 on Monday 29 August between 10-15pm and 11-15pm. I'm not sure when the second part will be on yet.

From the BBC Press Office:

The Field Of Blood is set in Glasgow and centres on would-be journalist Paddy Meehan (played by Jayd Johnson), a young copygirl working in a newspaper office.

Paddy dreams of becoming an investigative journalist – believing that in miscarriages of justice, reporters are sometimes the only hope. Funny, smart and feisty, Paddy seizes an opportunity to kick-start her career and becomes embroiled in a dark murder case. For Paddy, it's the opportunity of a lifetime but it comes at great personal cost.

It's 1982 and Glasgow is shocked by the horrific murder of two-year-old Brian Wilcox. Paddy is fascinated by the story and waits, along with the rest of the city, for the inevitable arrest of a murderer. When Paddy's 10-year-old cousin is charged with the crime she faces a stark choice between the two defining elements in her life. On one side is her job at the paper and dreams of becoming a journalist; on the other is her tight-knit Catholic family who want her to stop all this career nonsense and settle down to a quiet life with her fiancé. Paddy puts family first and decides not to use her inside track on the story to secure her first scoop.

Unfortunately for Paddy, glamorous colleague Heather has no such scruples and the secret shame of the Meehan clan is splashed across the front pages. Shut out by her family, Paddy decides to look into the case to prove her cousin's innocence. Defying her boss, she sets about investigating the case but there are shocking consequences for someone close to her.

You can read interviews with the director and some of the actors at the BBC website.

I reviewed the book The Field of Blood in 2006.

News: Denise Mina's next books

If you'd been worrying about the remaining books in Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan series and when they'd see the light of day then the following from a Publishers Weekly interview should be reassuring:

I switched publishers in the U.K., and my new publisher wanted a new series. They didn't want any more Paddy books because they didn't own them, but this summer they bought them from my old publisher. I'm doing a new Alex Morrow book now, after The End of the Wasp Season, and then I'm going back to Paddy to finish the last two. It's not that I got fed up with Paddy or I abandoned her. It was just a technical reason.

Read the whole interview here.

TV News: The Field of Blood (Denise Mina)

The BBC Press Office has today released details of an upcoming tv adaptation of Denise Mina's The Field of Blood:

Set in Glasgow, 1982, crime drama The Field Of Blood centres on would-be journalist Paddy Meehan, a young copygirl working in a newspaper office.

Stuck in an almost exclusively male-dominated world of limited opportunities and cynicism, Paddy dreams of becoming an investigative journalist – believing that in miscarriages of justice, reporters are sometimes the only hope.

Funny, smart, and feisty, Paddy seizes an opportunity to kick start her career and becomes embroiled in a dark murder case. For Paddy, it's the opportunity of a lifetime but comes at great personal cost...

Filming on The Field Of Blood, a thrilling investigative drama, begins in October with casting to be announced in the coming weeks. The drama will transmit on BBC One Scotland in 2011.

Caroline Parkinson, Creative Director, Creative Scotland, said: "Creative Scotland is delighted to be working with Andrea Calderwood at Slate North and BBC Scotland, in bringing to life the first of the Paddy Meehan series, The Field of Blood by Denise Mina to Scottish audiences. A gripping two-part thriller, it will be set and filmed in Glasgow and Creative Scotland hopes that this marks the first in a long series from this impressive team."

(The Paddy Meehan series was intended to be 5 books but it seems to have stopped at 3.)

New Reviews: Anderson, Indridason, Kelly, Levison, Mina, Suter

This week's batch of reviews should make you rush out and order all these books :-) :

New Reviews:

Pat Austin reviews Dark Flight by Lin Anderson concluding that this is "a cracking little series";

Maxine Clarke's reviews are always well written and thoughtful but she excels herself in this analysis of Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason;

Sunnie Gill's review of Murder on the Dance Floor by Susan Kelly makes this series sound worth checking out;

Laura Root reviews the noir thriller Dog Eats Dog by Iain Levison which appears to be another gem from Bitter Lemon Press;

Amanda Brown reviews the third in the Paddy Meehan series by Denise Mina - The Last Breath (apa Slip of the Knife)

and Fiona Walker reviews the International Dagger nominee A Deal With the Devil by Martin Suter calling it "an incredibly enjoyable, gripping and dramatic book".

Current Competition:

Win a copy of Nemesis by Jo Nesbo*

* no geographical restrictions on entrants (ends 30 September)

Denise Mina on Radio 4

On tonight's Front Row,"Denise Mina reflects on the boom in crime-writing in Scotland". The programme starts at 7.15pm but can be listened to online for seven days after broadcast.