The Crime Review: The End Of The Wasp Season, By Denise Mina

The police procedural really isn't my favorite slice of crime fiction pizza

. Probably because it's usually more about puzzles than people. Worse still it can be about the methodical, patient but ultimately tedious unravelling of those puzzles.

Denise Mina's The End Of The Wasp Season, however, while being a fairly straightforward police procedural, is all about character, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on what you look for in a crime novel. It certainly worked for me. Indeed, given that crime plots are, by nature, formulaic - and that's not a complaint, please note, it's merely stating a fact - you need something out of the ordinary to make a crime novel sizzle. In some cases that's onderful writing. Other times it's characters that you remember long after the actual story has faded. And, I guess, other times it can be other things too - mood, place, concept. Mina's skill is that she ticks the boxes both on writing and (especially) on character.

The End Of The Wasp Season has a brilliant, blistering opening. A young woman returns to her late mother's home and is woken from a deep sleep to be confronted by a couple of intruders. The scene is fantastically tense and the resulting murder is no less shocking despite its inevitability. It's not the originality of the idea which powers this beginning, but the sheer strength of the writing. You feel like you are reading this kind of material for the first time, whereas in actual fact - if you're a crime afficionado - you've probably read countless scenes like this. Oh boy, though, this one sizzles.

The murder is investigated by D S Alex Morrow, heavily pregnant with twins. Morrow is a no nonsense streetwise cop, with criminal connections in the family. Morrow's investigations reveal a connection between the woman's murder and the recent suicide by hanging of a wealthy industrialist whose dodgy business schemes have ruined the lives of hundreds of people. A man whose actions have also deeply damaged his own family.

And this is really what The End Of The Wasp Season is about. The consequences of those actions. The sins of the father. The stains of those sins. The moral or karmic feedback loop that bends through time.

The novel's plot is good, if not particularly different. But Mina's strength is her cast of full blooded, perfectly drawn characters and how she lets them lead the story. You feel like you're with them every step of the way, no matter where that path leads.

This is the first of Denise Mina's novels that I've read and it certainly won't be the last.

by: Harry Bingham

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