Mina laughs ruefully at mention of her themes. The novel is another brilliant exploration of the themes of family, friendship and justice. The plotting is clever, the characterisations deep, and Glasgow is well captured. She has inherited his house and, more importantly, the notes for the last feature he was working on. She isn’t inclined to do so, partly because her attention is elsewhere - a former lover has been murdered, possibly by the IRA. Meehan, by now a successful columnist living in a posh flat, is offered big money to do an interview with him. Her new novel, The Last Breath, the third in the Meehan series, is set in 1990, when one of those child murderers is to be released from jail. Mina’s books have looked dispassionately at alcoholism, incest, mental illness and many forms of abuse. The Field of Blood (2005), the first in the Paddy Meehan series, has a harrowing account of the murder of a child by older children. The main character in her trilogy, Maureen O’Donnell, suffers and we suffer with her. But those who know Mina’s brilliant but gruelling Garnethill trilogy and the first two in her Paddy Meehan series know that her work is steeped in darkness. One of her children is rampaging along the wide corridor outside the study door her partner is baking bread in the kitchen. This friendly, funny mother-of-two is perched on the edge of a chair in the airy study of her spacious townhouse in the West End of Glasgow. Mina and her present setting seem a million miles from such gruesome images.

And I really wanted to describe these scenes.’Ĭrime writer Denise Mina is talking about the starting point for her first novel, the award-winning Garnethill (1999), which she wrote when she was supposed to be working on her PhD at Strathclyde University. What made it human, what made it moving, was the detail. It was just mush but there was an eyeball lying there. With a shotgun, the air in the pellet expands so that if you shoot into the head the skull blows up. For ballistics they showed us a guy lying on the floor, and his head had burst. ‘I n the forensic science course I took at university they used photographs of dead bodies.

Exile denise mina