FINISHED READING - The Less Dead by Denise Mina

Margo Dunlop is waiting in a room to meet Nikki her birth Mother's sister. She is very late. Margo's councillor Tracey begins to think this might be a no show. Margo is a successful Doctor, who has a nice new flat of her own, and is currently emotionally bogged down in clearing out the house of Jeanette, the Mother who brought her up. Her death has triggered a desire in her to find out more about her birth Mother, Susan Brodie, who was murdered shortly after she was born. When Nikki finally turns up she is an extremely rough cut street wise woman, whose spent her life in prostitution. She is obsessive in her conviction that her sister was murdered by a former police officer Martin McPhail. The injustice of it all still angers her. This meeting is not an emotionally smooth one. Though Nikki and Margo are related, class and life experience wise, they are several miles apart. 

What she does learn is that Susan had been making moves to leave her lover, and Margo's probable Father Barney Keith, who had groomed Susan from the age of thirteen, when he was thirty two. The birth of her daughter appeared to have been making Susan take charge of her life, to plan to move on, just prior to her murder. But the deaths of prostitutes are never persued by the police with any great desire to ascertain the culprit. They are considered 'The Less Dead' because an early demise was thought an inevitable risk of the moral territory they lived in. Though initially reluctant to take things any further, Margo's enquiry kicks off death threat letters, her flat is trashed, her Mother Jeanette's house is broken into, and a green Honda car begins to follow her every move. Finding out what really happened to Susan starts to become ever more precient and urgent.

Denise Mina has done her research here, to fairly represent this whole underground world of woman who work the streets of Glasgow. There are many reasons why women fall into this lifestyle. Though they are commonly from poor backgrounds, or brought up in care homes. Prostitution maybe a choice, but in a world where the options are few and most are financially insecure. Constantly hand to mouth to feed their addiction habits, and living by their wits, Mina captures the psychological costs of the life of a prostitute, and this is not pretty. The character of Margo, has been brought up in a very different world to that of her birth Mother, one that had plausible aspirations and very real career prospects. Mina captures the clash of cultures and world views well, that lies at the heart of this story. As Margo flounders in trying to understand what is going on. She might have a growing respect for the tenacity of her birth Mother, but she comes to realise she might not have liked her, nor found her straightforward as a person to actually deal with. And that is an uneasy tension. Mina is extraordinarily good at placing very real human dilemmas and conflicts as the central driving mechanisms in her stories.

The Less Dead is a slow building crime procedural, told from an unusual angle, that keeps you guessing almost to the very end what really happened to Susan Brodie. As always with Denise Mina, its a vividly conceived story, rich with the detailed minutia of a lifestyle few of us are familiar with. Its not a fast paced novel, but it's an absorbing read nonetheless.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8