whosemuse 's review for:

Still Midnight by Denise Mina

4.0

---

This was both predictable, in its form and format, and new, in its texture and twists. The detective is Alex Morrow, a bit of a hard ass, in many ways the picture of a flawed police officer. As so many are. She is suffering from some kind of marital trouble, some grief or problem that isn’t named immediately but is revealed gradually. It reads like domestic abuse, and that could explain some of the attitude she displays at work, bucking the system and rubbing everyone the wrong way, but proving herself a competent, even brilliant investigator. The crime is perpetrated by a couple of guys who have a vaguely criminal history but are ultimately losers, dragged down by their inadequacies and thrown completely off kilter by their mistakes. The victims are innocent, or are they? Is anyone? The message seems to be that there is always more than meets the eye, and what we see on the surface is never the whole story. There is this weird fantastical element to the narrative, as various characters float off on dreamlike tangents, like they’ve lost touch with reality. The final scenes unspool with the reader understanding that he knows more than the character involved does, and that is an interesting device. It’s a bit of an unfinished ending, but that’s just the way things work out sometimes.