Blood, Salt, Water

Denise Mina is one of those authors that you can always trust to spin a good yarn, and once in a while an absolute ripper. BLOOD, SALT, WATER is somewhere on this reader’s scale between really good and ripper.

Taut and pointed, her ability to skewer character’s personality traits - good and bad - is razor sharp as usual, with a beautiful turn of sarcasm when required. Putting those characters in a realistic small-town location in Scotland provides not just a wonderful sense of place, but an interesting juxtaposition of have’s and have-nots, whilst leaving more than enough room for some skewering of superficial assumptions.

The 5th book in the Alex Morrow series sees a complicated, small town plot revolve around one childhood friend show more who stayed, and others who have recently returned. Whilst there’s plenty happening in the small town, there is also a disappearance to be investigated. A particularly embarrassing one as a very high profile woman disappears in suspicious circumstances when she’s supposedly being shadowed by Morrow and her team. The “battle” for territory between the local cops and London is intensive as it turns out that recent legislation changes mean lucrative possibilities for the arresting force.

Needless to say there are a lot of ongoing threads in BLOOD, SALT, WATER that could be less convincing, or receive less attention in the hands of some authors. Mina, on the other hand, manages to keep the balance equally between all the characters and all the threads. Along the way she produces an excellent entry in a really good series, although you could definitely read this as a standalone (or as in my case, out of order in the series).

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This is the final instalment of the Alex Morrow quintet, which I have enjoyed immensely from the very first page. The fourth book, The Red Road, was the tough read, the point at which Mina took the series in a new direction. Blood, Salt, Water feels like a return to form, reintroducing the structure in which Morrow’s chapters are neatly sandwiched between the viewpoints of the troubled characters who are central to the crime she is investigating.

What the nature of that crime actually is remains something of a mystery for much of the novel. At the beginning, a woman is brutally executed, but for a long time the reader is unsure who she was. Another woman—almost certainly connected to organised crime—has gone missing, but are they show more one and the same? Just as Morrow doesn’t know, neither did I as a reader. Without ever being disorientating, the different narrative streams—Morrow’s investigation and Iain’s reaction to what he has done—do not seem to follow the same time signature. We follow Morrow over days, and Iain seemingly over hours. And it works.

Mina is an excellent writer, and I now have a number of her other books lined up and ready to go. In this series she has produced something genuinely unusual: a woman detective juggling her own life; ordinary people engulfed by the horror of crime without it ever being sensationalised; a clear-eyed examination of the psychology of perpetrators; and a sense that even in adversity, people must still focus on the humdrum elements of their lives. All of it is steeped in the flavour of Glasgow, but without a single cliché. She writes about damaged characters, brilliantly describing how, when at breaking point, the descent into madness and chaos is a path easily taken. Mina’s villains aren’t evil as such, and it is impossible not to occasionally feel sympathy for them, or even like them.

I’d kill to be able to write crime like this. show less

As usual, a high quality story from Mina. She manages to soften the lines between crooks and victims and the reader may sympathize with the guilty as much as the innocent. The story is sprinkled with Mina's perceptive, often acerbic lines. Alex Morrow is a winning character, scrupulously honest, even about her own feelings, unafraid, and without the peculiar habits and flaws suffered by most fictional detectives. She begins what appears to be a straightforward investigation of what looks like money laundering, which of course becomes much more complex as layers are uncovered. This is a book that will appeal to all readers, not just those who read mysteries. Mina has taken the crime novel to new heights.

Denise Mina has done it again. With her Glasgow-set mysteries, particularly those featuring DI Alex Morrow, she brings the reader into the heads of all of her characters, revealing their good sides and their weaknesses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first chapter of Blood, Salt, Water, which is a punch in the gut that makes the reader feel for everyone involved in the situation.

The plot is certainly unpredictable and would defy explanation even if I wanted to attempt it, and some of it got downright weird. The strength of this book and series lies primarily in the characters. It is refreshing to have a cop with a relatively stable home life as a protagonist, and Alex as a person is interesting to follow. The scene where she show more and the Argyle and Bute cop bond over the anger management course they've both been required to take was a particularly nice moment.

This series is recommended if you like books set in Scotland that have a good sense of place, or if you like solid female protagonists. show less

God I love this writer. Her stories and characters are like life — multi-layered, simultaneously or alternating between unexpected and predictable, likeable and appalling, and everything in between. And the writing—! She employs the whole range: raw, rough, smooth, mellifluous (she actually uses once the word "immellifluous," and it is, astonishingly, just the right word, right there), and beautiful. One sentence that contains "lazy notes of yesterday" — probably not quoted quite right; couldn't find it again — turned up, singular and perfect, in just the right place, at the right time, to make the reader experience it as the character does. "A pang of chemical regret"— what a knockout expression. And the description of a show more colleague Dickensianly named "Thankless" as "aggravatingly declamatory" made me laugh out loud. (And he is, too.)

I had trouble putting this down to go to sleep. First thing I picked up this morning, read till the end. Even read the acknowledgements, would have read the index if she'd included one. show less

Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina is the fifth book in her Alex Morrow series. There hasn’t been a further entry in this series since this book was published in 2015 which leads me to believe that the author has moved on from this sequence. There was definitely a feeling of closure in this story. The actual plot was a combination of murder, fraud, drug dealing and blackmail.

There isn’t a lot of mystery involved in this story, we learn very quickly whodunnit so the plot becomes more about explaining the how and why of the various crimes and exactly who is connected to who. A wealthy businesswoman disappears from Glasgow and all traces of her lead to a small seaside town. Of course all is not as it seems on the surface as the show more businesswoman appears to have been under a loose police surveillance. She is suspected to be heavily involved in a large scale con, and the reasons for her disappearance are not immediately clear. Meanwhile a drowned woman has been pulled from the nearby loch and a local pub has been burned to the ground causing the death of two more individuals. How all these crimes mesh together in this intricately plotted literary thriller makes for a very good read.

I have long been a fan of Denise Mina. Her books are dark, intense and meant for a mature audience. This well constructed book is much more than a straight crime story as she doesn’t tie up all the ends neatly, instead she shows that law can be imperfect and that often money can make a difference in how justice is dealt out. Even if this series has come to an end, I look forward to continuing my exploration of this author’s work. show less

This was gripping throughout with a twisty plot. I enjoyed the moment Morrow and DI Simmons bonded over the realization they had both been sent on the same anger management course. Mina is very good at getting you to sympathize with murderers by inhabiting their perspective. There was even something of a wrapping up/explanation at the end of this one. I think this is the last of the Morrow series, which is a pity.