MARCH 2013 - AudioFile
Much of the charm of Mina's new mystery comes from narrator Moira Quirk’s delightful delivery. Her Scots brogue is easy to understand yet beautifully exotic. (I could listen to her read the phone book.) Her characters feel real and familiar. Mina's novel, with its three story lines, is disjointed, but the subplots all come together neatly toward the end. A tendency to give women men's names makes the plot slightly confusing because of the large cast. Furthermore, the names of lead detective Alex Morrow, called “Alex,” and one of her detectives, Tasmin Leonard, called “Leonard,” make gender identification a bit troublesome. A robbery at a busy Glasgow post office goes south when an elderly man is killed after helping the robber. Glasgow's finest must find the killer and solve the other mysteries the investigation opens up. M.S. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
At the start of Scottish author Mina’s excellent third crime novel featuring Det. Sgt. Alex Morrow (after 2011’s The End of the Wasp Season), a lone gunman enters a Glasgow post office, where he orders the patrons to lie on the floor. An elderly gentleman hands his young grandson to a stranger and gets up to assist the robber by filling bags with cash. The gunman then cuts the old man down with a hail of bullets from his AK-47 pistol. Meanwhile, looming budget cuts and police layoffs lure two of Morrow’s subordinates into stealing a pile of dirty drug money. Finally, a former labor hero turned politician is caught up in a sex scandal with a 17-year-old female staffer. While Mina keeps Alex’s life outside of work mostly on the back burner, she ups the stakes by taking us into the dark, beating heart of modern Glasgow, where the real deals are struck and the spoils divided. (Feb.)
MARCH 2013 - AudioFile
Much of the charm of Mina's new mystery comes from narrator Moira Quirk’s delightful delivery. Her Scots brogue is easy to understand yet beautifully exotic. (I could listen to her read the phone book.) Her characters feel real and familiar. Mina's novel, with its three story lines, is disjointed, but the subplots all come together neatly toward the end. A tendency to give women men's names makes the plot slightly confusing because of the large cast. Furthermore, the names of lead detective Alex Morrow, called “Alex,” and one of her detectives, Tasmin Leonard, called “Leonard,” make gender identification a bit troublesome. A robbery at a busy Glasgow post office goes south when an elderly man is killed after helping the robber. Glasgow's finest must find the killer and solve the other mysteries the investigation opens up. M.S. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Who would shoot an inoffensive retiree in the middle of an otherwise routine robbery? One minute, geology student Martin Pavel is queued up at the post office; the next, he's lying on the floor at the command of a man with a mask, an AK-47 and a very short temper. Yet Martin is a lot luckier than Brendan Lyons, the retired bus driver who offered to help the gunman collect the loot and got thoroughly shot for his trouble. It seems clear that the robber recognized the old man, but even so, why would he feel the need to kill him? DS Alexandra Morrow would love to bear down hard on the case, but as usual, there are other problems. After pulling over dicey driver Hugh Boyle, DC Tamsin Leonard and DC George Wilder have found £200,000 concealed in his car; instead of turning it in, Wilder's had the bright idea of splitting it between themselves; and the surprisingly resourceful Boyle has photographed them in possession of the loot. So, even though Alex gets a promising lead that links the gunman to the anonymous figure who menaced householder Anita Costello three years ago, Strathclyde's finest is hardly enjoying its finest hour. Higher up in the social ranks (though equally far down the ethical scale), Labour MP Kenny Gallagher is battling rumors that he's taken party volunteer Jill Bowman, 17, under more than his wing--rumors that are particularly hard to scotch since they're true. As Gallagher faces the ruin of his career, readers will wonder how Alex (The End of the Wasp Season, 2011, etc.) can possibly tie these cases together. Though the final surprise doesn't have the snap of logical inevitability, it's depressingly realistic.
