This novel tells the story of two women. One was arrested for homicide when she was fourteen. The other was a detective who struggled to go up the career ladder due to her family history, her brother was a gangster who was involved in plenty of criminal activities. Throughout the book, I was taken between 1997 when the homicide happened to the present when a crime was committed with fingerprints of a prisoner, someone who was already being held by the police. What's the connection between the past and the present?



I'm the kind of reader who picks up a book without any expectations. I let the author to transport me into the world they have conjured and allow myself to be submerged in this dimension. Denise Mina blew me away. The Red Road is a very fine crime book. It's carefully crafted with complex pattern. Denise was like a spider, weaving her webs, all coming from different directions, entangling one to another with a purpose. After reading so many romance novels, I find this book to be very dark; murder, pedophilia, money laundry, corruptions. My heart went out for both women in the story. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the complex stories and how they all linked up well together in the end. I'll be on a hunt for more of her books.

The car radio had automatically come to life when my dad turned the car's ignition. That's where I was. Where were you the night Princess Diana died? Denise Mina's novel, The Red Road, begins on that same evening; an evening where children become criminals and, like Diana's death, the repercussions and memories of one night continue into the present. Mina takes you to a UK reminiscent of the tv-series Broadchurch or a season long story-arc of The Bill. On its face, The Red Road is a procedural crime novel, taking us from Glasgow police stations to courtroom witness docks and even an abandoned Skyfall-esque castle in the Scottish Highlands. But The Red Road is surprisingly more than that; the writing is at times simply beautiful, the plot more intricate than expected, and the characterisation real. There are no 'good ones' and 'bad ones', which at first felt unsatisfying, but upon reflection was true to the complexity of circumstance, history and human character. Mina has done to Scotland what Larsson did to Scandanavian crime writing, and no doubt is the continued emergence of a developing sub-genre ("Tartan Noir") in crime fiction.