The Long Drop by Denise Mina***

Reading dates: 13 October–17 November 2017

I love Denise Mina and I love the fact that she is an artist, and experiments, even though she also has a winning formula that is very successful in the crime fiction. The Long Drop is true crime and her voice more literary than her previous novels. I like the first half of the book very, very much. Her choice of examining the character of Peter Manuel thought the lens of his night with Watt, the husband of one of the killed women, is fabulous, but the shift towards following Manuel, and the final court case, with Manuel’s family, is a bit too abrupt, as if a few chapters were missing. The atmosphere is wonderfully set and some sentences are chilling, as is appropriate to the topic. Yet, I felt there was a lot more to this book, to the story and to how it was decided to be told.