Still Midnight is one of many books by Denise Mina which have received and will receive rave reviews and many great accolades.  She is a winner of the John Creasey Memorial Award for Best First Crime Novel.

It is a rather slow story about a crime which has gone wrong from the beginning; the perpetrators really messed up on who to grab and why, and then have to make due with who they got instead of the hostage victim they were supposed to have taken.  The two perps in the story are named Eddy and Pat, the man they were supposed to kidnap is Bob, the one they took by mistake, Aamir. In the process, Aamir’s daughter was shot.

The two hold Aamir for a really large ransom, which the family is totally unable to pay, and end up fleeing to Uganda.  Glasgow Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow digs in and turns over the very insubstantial collection of clues and eventually comes up with a theory about all of this and why it happened.  While she is doing this, we get to see into Alex’s life and what drives her.  Unfortunately, some of these insights come too late to make the story and the reader soften towards Morrow, who is a really hard, take-no-hostages type of battler, and who really needs to solve crimes for a living.

Still Midnight is a compelling, dark story that shows in great detail a lot of the darker, seedier sides of Glasgow and Scotland in general, which is what seems to drive Mina in her stories.  I had a hard time reading it, because of the vocabulary differences between our English and Scottish English. Even though they are the same language, the meanings and a lot of the words are amazingly different in the text.  The story was a bit to deeply involved within the minds of the perps, and not enough in the victim's or Morrow's, which would have made a better read and created more sympathy towards Aamir and his daughter and family. But although that does detract a bit from the story, it is still a good one to read, offering the reader a lot of insight into the Scottish mind and setting.  All in all, a very good read and I am not disappointed to have been taken on this journey of crime gone wrong.