Field of blood

The first in a new series by Scotland’s princess of crime, Denise Mina.

When the body of a four-year-old boy is found tortured and battered to death, it is assumed the child has been the victim of a vicious sexual predator. Instead the police are led, not to the house of an adult killer, but to the doors of two eleven-year-old boys.

Fresh from school, Paddy Meehan has just started work on the Scottish Daily News. Determined to be an investigative journalist, she also wants to be financially independent. But her colleagues — hard-drinking chauvinists to a man — believe a woman’s place to be in the home, and preferably in the bedroom. And Paddy’s family too: all they want is for her to get married to her fiancé, Sean, and have children of her own. Then Paddy discovers that one of the boys charged with the child’s murder is Sean’s cousin, Callum. Soon Callum’s name is all over the News, and her family blames Paddy. Shunned by Sean and those closest to her, Paddy finds herself dangerously alone.

Set in Glasgow in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and unemployment that decimate the old industrial heartlands, The Field of Blood is the first in a stunning new crime series featuring Paddy Meehan. Infused with Mina’s unique blend of dark humour, personal insights and the social injustices that pervade society, this is a novel that will grip the reader while challenging our perceptions of childhood innocence, crime and punishment, right or wrong.

Author Bio:Denise Mina has written extensively as an academic researcher on the medicalization of deviant women, and until recently she taught Criminology and Criminal Law. She is the author of Garnethill for which she won the John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1998. Her other novels are Exile, Resolution and Sanctum.

The New York Times – Janet Maslin

As Ms. Mina grippingly reveals the implications of these events, it’s clear that she is something more than a crime writer. Like Dennis Lehane with Mystic River, she describes a close-knit, secretive community in a substantial novel that happens to be centered on a crime.