The Less Dead by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Margo, a thirty-something physician, had been adopted as a newborn baby. She is searching for her birth mother. Through the adoption agency she meets her aunt, from whom she learns that her mother had been murdered soon after giving birth. The mother, although a drug user who needed to make money on the streets to feed her habit, managed to give up heroin for pregnancy to give her daughter a better chance in life.

Margo is being watched and has received threatening letters, but the danger only makes her more determined to uncover and explain the events of the past and to identify her mother's murderer. Many characters appear in the novel, and the mystery thread is quite complicated. To me, the most important aspect of the novel is the gloomy social commentary. Police had not invested any time in trying to solve the mother's murder. After all, she was one of the "less dead" - people, who apparently did not deserve any efforts to help from the institutions.

Margo's mother, although long dead and appearing only in memories of others, is one of the main characters in the novel. As usual, I like Mina's writing and the social commentary, and I recommend the novel. Yet, for me, it does not reach the stellar level of the author's better books.

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