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BLOOD, SALT, WATER
by Denise Mina
Little, Brown, December 2015
304 pages
$26.00
ISBN: 0316380547


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In her fifth appearance, DI Alex Morrow leaves the familiar gritty streets of her native Glasgow to look into the disappearance of a wealthy Spanish businesswoman, Roxanna Fuentecilla, whom the police suspect of being involved in shady dealings - drugs, perhaps, or money laundering. She has gone missing, her absence reported by one of her children and it is unclear whether she has disappeared willingly or not. She had been living in Helensburgh, a small and very well-off town on the shores of Loch Lomond near Glasgow. Posh it may be, but as Alex will soon discover, it is as prone to crime as anywhere else, though it often takes place at one remove from the instigator.

Before Alex ever gets to Helensburgh, however, Mina describes the death of an unnamed woman, one who unaccountably goes willingly off in the company of two men, "as biddable as a heifer." Where she thinks they are leading her or why we only find out much later, but she awakens to her mortal danger at the very last moment, too late to escape. The man who kills her, an ex-prisoner named Iain, employs an "old prison trick" to bring her down, but then, bending over her body, her dying breath sounds to him like his mother's name and he breathes it in with his shocked recognition of what he has done. He will turn out to be among the most sympathetic of the characters in the novel despite his deed. And he cannot rid himself of the blood on his hands. Salt water, his mother once told him, is the only thing for blood, but the water in Loch Lomond is fresh.

There are several other plot threads going as well and Mina will, as she has before, manage to connect them all without straining credibility before the tale is ended. But even stronger than her ability to construct a plot are her sensitive and observant approach to character, her ability to evoke a sense of place, and her talent for telling description.

Technically, BLOOD, SALT, WATER is a police procedural, but it is one that keeps the technical details of modern policing to a minimum. Perhaps, like Alex, there are a lot of technical things Mina knows nothing about, but she's not about to admit it if she can help it. What she does know a lot about is the particular strains felt especially by women officers in the higher ranks of the service. There is a marvellous scene in which Alex and another female DI warily circle one another until they suddenly find common ground - they've both been cited for anger management problems and they both have domestic situations of the sort that conventionally women are expected to sort out, regardless of the demands of their careers. Unlike far too many police-centred novels, Alex is not burnt out - tired, yes, pulled in several directions, certainly, but she retains her ability to recognize the human in the criminal. She is no sentimentalist, but her half brother is now doing time for some terrible crimes, and while she never excuses him, she does know him very well.

Mina is not the sort of writer given to lush physical description of landscape or place. Instead she is able to convey something that may be even more informative - the "feel" of a place at a certain moment in time. This is particular notable here, as the book is set in the run-up to the recent referendum on Scottish independence. As someone who has weathered a parallel event in my own country, I can vouch for the accuracy of what she reports - the edgy attempts to feel out a new acquaintance's position without necessarily revealing one's own; the degree to which the question is never altogether absent from mind; the anxiety for it all to be over, however it goes.

She has a talent for the sharp descriptive phrase as well - that murder victim heading off to her death like a biddable heifer, for example, or the smoker dragging so hard on his cigarette that he looks as if he might swallow his own lips. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final and devastating chapter of the book, where the cost of crime to individuals and families is made unbearably, crushingly clear.

Now that PD James and Ruth Rendell have departed the scene, it may be that Denise Mina remains their chief heir. She's closer to Rendell than to James, but her voice is singularly her own. It is not one you want to miss.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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