Field of Blood

September 5, 2005
It's a pleasure to listen to O'Neill's lovely Scottish rhythms and accent narrating this alternately amusing and chilling mystery of the recent death of a three-year-old—a death intricately connected with a similar murder a decade earlier. O'Neill's diction is so clear that not a word is lost within her accent, and she easily differentiates the characters, youthful and elderly, male and female, Scottish and Irish. Though her squeaky, high-pitched voice for Paddy Meehan, our young protagonist, "copyboy" and aspiring journalist, is often irksome, she helps us empathize with Paddy's struggles with body-image, sexual yearnings, and her desire to make it in the male domains of the newsroom and the barroom. Paddy's small town near Glasgow, populated by Scottish Protestants and Irish Catholic immigrants, is fraught with political and religious tensions that complicate her life as much as the murder plot. The abridgment occasionally leaves listeners slightly puzzled, but all is satisfyingly resolved at the end of this psychologically complex tale of a girl seeking her identity and her values as a woman and would-be professional in relation to family, friends and community. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, May 9).

Starred review from May 9, 2005
If this novel were a movie, filmgoers would tag it the one to beat for the Oscars. Beyond creating sweaty physical tension, the brilliant Mina may have invented a subgenre: moral suspense. Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a copygirl at Glasgow's Daily News
, has struggled with issues of goodness since childhood. "I knew I was lying when I made my first communion," she confesses to fiancé Sean Ogilvy the night she delivers other shockers. She won't marry him. And she wants his help interviewing his 10-year-old cousin, Callum, who's been charged with murdering a toddler. Scots are deemed legally responsible at eight, but Paddy sees Callum as another victim. Paddy, who shares a nickname with a career criminal wrongfully imprisoned for murder, can't tolerate injustice. At the heart of the plot is her decision pose as colleague Heather Allen when she makes dangerous inquiries, a choice that spells death for the real Heather, who's everything Paddy isn't: slim blonde whistle bait—and ambitious enough to steal a story from Paddy. After Heather's murder, the reader writhes, not just because Paddy's in danger but because a moment of awful truth awaits her. Mina spins the complexities in the rough music of her working-class Scots, unsparing of brutal details, but unfailingly elegant in her humanity. Agent, Henry Dunow.

Starred review from June 15, 2005
A bonny wean is brutally murdered in gritty Glasgow (a city where a bloke can earn himself a beating for flourishing an umbrella), and the guilty parties seem all too obvious -two children barely older than the victim. Paddy Meehan is working as a lowly gofer at the city newspaper and trying desperately to placate her multiple demons: her Catholic heritage, her ambition, her family's grinding poverty, and her weight. When she discovers that one of the alleged murderers is her fiancé 's cousin, she starts her own investigation, using the name of a real reporter at the paper. When that reporter turns up dead, it's an open question if Paddy has bitten off more than even she can chew. The first volume in a promised, and promising, new series from Mina ("Deception"), this should earn her even more fans and cement her position as Glasgow's retort to other Scottish luminaries like Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. A thoroughly engaging read; suitable for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/15/05.] -Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2005
Scottish hard-boiled writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the literary equivalents of post-Calvin church architecture: spiky, gray, grim. In her Glasgow novels, Mina, especially, finds the emotional equivalent of what her characters endure and what some inflict on others in the unrelievedly bleak tenements and back ways of the wrong side of town. She introduces a new heroine here, a young woman, Paddy Meehan, who works as a gofer at a Glasgow daily in 1981. The story centers on the horrific killing of a little boy by two other boys. Paddy gets drawn into the case through her recognition that one of the boys charged is related to her fiance. Although the connection and Paddy's involvement are a bit of a stretch, the novel offers a fascinating look at sexism and newspaper politics--and a reminder of how tough it is to be poor and ambitious.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)