The Long Drop by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] all the hope he will ever feel is sucked out through his soles into the wet, treacherous earth..."

Denise Mina is one of my absolutely favorite writers and of the six books of hers that I have reviewed here on Goodreads, I have rated two with five stars (Garnethill, a masterpiece transcending the crime/mystery genre and The Dead Hour , a great crime novel) and three others with four stars. So I was really looking forward to reading Ms. Mina's newest work, The Long Drop (2017). Even if I do not think it is one of her better books the novel is definitely a very good read and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The fact that it is a standalone novel is an added bonus. I deeply appreciate Ms. Mina stopping each series that she had begun at three installments. It is more difficult for a writer (as Ms. Mina herself confirmed during her conversation with readers on Goodreads) but the tedious repetitive literary routine is thus avoided.

After 12 purely fiction crime/mystery novels, Ms. Mina sort of ventures into the field of the so-called "true crime". Despite the standard disclaimer about "fictitious characters and events" this is a fictionalization of the real-life story of a famous American-Scottish serial killer, Peter Manuel, convicted in 1958 for seven murders, and suspected of even more killings. I have read about twenty books in the true-crime genre, and this is the first one that I really like. I have been trying to understand why and the simplest explanation I have is that while most true-crime books attempt to show fictionalized events as true, Ms. Mina does the opposite: she writes about true events as fiction. And nothing conveys truth better than well-written fiction.

The novel intertwines events that happen in two time frames: the night of December 2/December 3, 1957, and the second half of May of 1958. The memorable December night begins when a famous and successful Glasgow lawyer accompanies his client, William Watt, whose family was murdered, to meet Peter Manuel. Manuel wants to sell information about the murders. We follow Watt and Manuel in their night-long voyage from one pub to another, we witness their drunkenness progress through a number of stages, and we read about the grim lives of various characters involved in the story. The other time frame presents scenes from Manuel's trial.

Ms. Mina presents a masterful picture of the working-class Glasgow of the late 1950s, the Glasgow of nightmares. She depicts the lives of men whose daily routine involves either extremely hard physical work or crime, daily heavy drinking in pubs, and the unifying pattern - vicious beatings they administer to their wives and children. In the meantime, the overlords of the economic crime, the masters of robberies, extortions, and protection racket, such as Dandy McKay, the real rulers of this working-class city, are beyond prosecution, untouchable by police as the crime lords, the police, and the city government live in perfect symbiosis. This is an extremely dark novel, made even darker by Ms. Mina cynical and thus deeply realistic portrayal of the basest human instincts.

At the beginning I had some difficulties connecting with the characters, but then I read the gut-wrenching passage about the father of one of the murdered girls:

"...his wife is waiting for him. She puts her arms around him and he sobs into her hair.
Mr. Cooke thinks about the weeping woman in the gallery. His unique desolation was all he had left of his Isabelle. Now the crying woman has taken that as well. He has been robbed again."

From that moment I could not put the book away: at times it shook my deeply and I appreciated the terrific prose.

I admire Ms. Mina for trying something different than repeating Alex Morrow stories. She is a great writer and even if not all her works are masterpieces they are all wonderful and worthwhile reads.

Three and a half stars.

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