Still Midnight by Denise Mina
Review by Cheryl R. (Spuddie) 
#1 Alex Morrow series mystery set in Glasgow, Scotland. Alex is a Detective Sergeant who ends up working a botched kidnapping case in which the sixty-year-old Amir Anwar is taken from his comfortable suburban home by an amateurish group of thugs. Problem is, the kidnappers seem to have gotten the wrong guy–they were after some guy named Bob. Mr. Anwar is a Ugandan political refugee who owns a small corner shop, not someone you’d expect to have a two million quid ransom lying around.
The case looks to be a big one and Morrow is disappointed when her rival of the same rank, golden boy Grant Bannerman, is given SIO for the case and she has to take orders from him. Morrow also deals with personal demons that make just doing the day-to-day of her job none too easy.
Gritty and fast-paced (definitely not a cozy!) with interesting twists and turns, the author reveals information about the main character in such a way that you get well sucked into the story itself before finding out details about why Alex behaves and thinks the way she does. Tantalizing tidbits are dropped and then later you find out some heart-wrenching things that make you gasp. I feel that we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg with Alex and I look forward to seeing what she gets up to in her next adventure.
The story is also told in part from the point of view of other characters, including the ‘bad guys’ and it really serves to humanize the criminals so that you feel they aren’t all that different from you or I, just someone who made a couple of bad choices that left them on a path that is now hard to turn from. Also a word of caution–the author uses a lot of Scottish slang and dialect in the book, so if this is something that annoys you, you may want to pass this by…but it really does help you to remember that you are not in New York or Atlanta or even London…this is definitely Glasgow.
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