The Field of Blood - Softcover

Mina, Denise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553815253 ISBN 13: 9780553815252

Publisher: Bantam, 2006

Synopsis

The first in a new series by Scotland’s princess of crime, Denise Mina.

When the body of a four-year-old boy is found tortured and battered to death, it is assumed the child has been the victim of a vicious sexual predator. Instead the police are led, not to the house of an adult killer, but to the doors of two eleven-year-old boys.

Fresh from school, Paddy Meehan has just started work on the Scottish Daily News. Determined to be an investigative journalist, she also wants to be financially independent. But her colleagues — hard-drinking chauvinists to a man — believe a woman’s place to be in the home, and preferably in the bedroom. And Paddy’s family too: all they want is for her to get married to her fiancé, Sean, and have children of her own. Then Paddy discovers that one of the boys charged with the child’s murder is Sean’s cousin, Callum. Soon Callum’s name is all over the News, and her family blames Paddy. Shunned by Sean and those closest to her, Paddy finds herself dangerously alone.

Set in Glasgow in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and unemployment that decimate the old industrial heartlands, The Field of Blood is the first in a stunning new crime series featuring Paddy Meehan. Infused with Mina’s unique blend of dark humour, personal insights and the social injustices that pervade society, this is a novel that will grip the reader while challenging our perceptions of childhood innocence, crime and punishment, right or wrong.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author

Denise Mina has written extensively as an academic researcher on the medicalization of deviant women, and until recently she taught Criminology and Criminal Law. She is the author of Garnethill for which she won the John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1998. Her other novels are Exile, Resolution and Sanctum.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

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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About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0553815253
• ISBN 13: 9780553815252
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 544