This translates into mystery writing, but just as there’s now a whole series of female Scottish writers (my personal adoration of A.L. Galloway herself points to the dearth of role models when she started out. In a recent review/interview with brilliant Scottish novelist Janice Galloway, the interviewer writes: “lthough Scottish fiction can boast a line of hard men its hard women have been less visible”. It’s not a huge coincidence that the first names that came to mind are American or English. I even enjoy the faux-British mediocrity of Elizabeth George. I have to admit to not having read any British examples, but the American writers I’ve read are all really good, among them Laura Lippman and Sara Gran. While the basic tradition is mostly dominated by brooding male detectives, whose inner demons make for excellent drama to supplement the murder mystery, there have been quite a few important female writers. While I find the genre very entertaining, I don’t actually read mysteries a whole lot I am nevertheless aware that there’s a specific Scottish tradition of that kind of writing, although most of those books, like the vast oeuvre of Ian Rankin, are set in Edinburgh. I read it on one long train ride between two university libraries and I enjoyed it so much that I somehow started to take notes on it (I can’t tell you why that’s a sign of enjoyment for me, it just is). Denise Mina’s crime procedural Field of Blood is a fairly straightforward crime novel set in Glasgow in 1981. So when I said there would be shorter reviews as well as longer ones, I actually had this book in mind. Mina, Denise (2005), Field of Blood, Little, Brown

Field of blood denise mina