Field of Blood (Paddy Meehan, Book 1) - Hardcover

Mina, Denise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316735930 ISBN 13: 9780316735933

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

Synopsis

Set in Glasgow in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and unemployment that decimated the old industrial heartlands, The Field of Blood is the first in the tense Paddy Meehan series from Scotland's princess of crime, Denise Mina.

The vicious murder of a young child provides rookie journalist Paddy Meehan with her first big break when the suspect turns out to be her fiance's 11-year old cousin. Launching her own investigation into the horrific crime, Paddy uncovers lines of deception deep in Glasgow's past, with more horrific crimes in the future if she fails to solve the mystery.

Infused with Mina's unique blend of dark humor, personal insights and social injustice, the story grips the reader while challenging our perceptions of childhood innocence, crime and punishment, and right or wrong.

About this title

About the Author

Denise Mina is the author of more than ten novels, including The Long Drop, winner of the 2017 McIlvanney Prize for Scottish crime book of the year, and the Garnethill trilogy, the first installment of which won the John Creasey Memorial Award for best first crime novel. Mina has twice received the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She lives in Glasgow.

Reviews

Starred Review. If this novel were a movie, filmgoers would tag it the one to beat for the Oscars. Beyond creating sweaty physical tension, the brilliant Mina may have invented a subgenre: moral suspense. Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a copygirl at Glasgow's Daily News, has struggled with issues of goodness since childhood. "I knew I was lying when I made my first communion," she confesses to fiancé Sean Ogilvy the night she delivers other shockers. She won't marry him. And she wants his help interviewing his 10-year-old cousin, Callum, who's been charged with murdering a toddler. Scots are deemed legally responsible at eight, but Paddy sees Callum as another victim. Paddy, who shares a nickname with a career criminal wrongfully imprisoned for murder, can't tolerate injustice. At the heart of the plot is her decision pose as colleague Heather Allen when she makes dangerous inquiries, a choice that spells death for the real Heather, who's everything Paddy isn't: slim blonde whistle bait—and ambitious enough to steal a story from Paddy. After Heather's murder, the reader writhes, not just because Paddy's in danger but because a moment of awful truth awaits her. Mina spins the complexities in the rough music of her working-class Scots, unsparing of brutal details, but unfailingly elegant in her humanity.
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Scottish hard-boiled writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the literary equivalents of post-Calvin church architecture: spiky, gray, grim. In her Glasgow novels, Mina, especially, finds the emotional equivalent of what her characters endure and what some inflict on others in the unrelievedly bleak tenements and back ways of the wrong side of town. She introduces a new heroine here, a young woman, Paddy Meehan, who works as a gofer at a Glasgow daily in 1981. The story centers on the horrific killing of a little boy by two other boys. Paddy gets drawn into the case through her recognition that one of the boys charged is related to her fiance. Although the connection and Paddy's involvement are a bit of a stretch, the novel offers a fascinating look at sexism and newspaper politics--and a reminder of how tough it is to be poor and ambitious. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316735930
• ISBN 13: 9780316735933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368