Still Midnight by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Aamir raised his face to the God who had suffered him to live through children and work and meals, a million bloody meals, sleep, and changes of carpet and striving, endless pointless striving.
He turned his face up and muttered a final quiet prayer: "You bloody nasty bastard.""

I love reading Denise Mina's books. I am tuned exactly to her frequencies and her novels always deeply touch me. I know that in Ms. Mina's novels I read about real people and about the human striving, "endless pointless striving." The dark, grim, colorless world, where there is no fairness, no hope, no way out. No evil either, just the normal human stupidity of thrashing about in futile attempts to grab a tiny piece of happiness. And Ms. Mina's writing! Strong, never emotional or sentimental, economical with no wasted sentences or words. Her works by far transcend the crime novel genre and even more so the silly tartan noir label. So far, I have rated two of her books as masterpieces, Garnethill and The Dead Hour .

Still Midnight (2010) is the first novel in the Alex Morrow series. It begins with a captivating scene: three men in a van are watching a bungalow preparing for home invasion. The attack is described in gloriously chaotic detail. One of the men yells something about a payback for Afghanistan. Shots are fired, a woman is hurt, a hostage is taken.

Detective Sergeant Morrow of the Strathclyde CID is one of the detectives conducting the investigation where it soon turns out that the occupants of the bungalow have Ugandan Asian rather than Afghan roots. We follow Morrow's investigation in which not only the criminals are the enemy but also some of her scheming colleagues from CID. Ms. Mina wonderfully captures the ugliness of the office politics - the same dirty ticks are used in a police department environment as in a business corporation or a university department. And the language!

"[...] he had a leadership style that would be described with a lot of bullshit buzzwords: inclusive, facilitating, enabling."

Again, Still Midnight is less of a crime novel and more a book about people's hard lives. There are moving flashbacks from one of the main characters' past - recreating dramatic events on the road to Entebbe. We learn about DS Morrow's private life: the recent few months have been quite painful for her.

There is also Danny, Morrow's half-brother, a master criminal of sorts:

"He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage."

While it is true that the Danny's thread adds to the richness of the plot, I do not quite appreciate the thread: it seems to me a bit of a contrivance, like an artificially created axis of conflict. That's why I can't rate the novel very high - it is below my "Mina average" rating. Still, a great and a highly recommended read!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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