Gods and Beasts (Alex Morrow Series #3)

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Overview

It's the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK-47. An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunman fill bags with cash, then carries them to the door. He opens the door and bows his head; the robber fires off the AK-47, tearing the grandfather in two.

DS Alex Morrow arrives on the scene and finds that the alarm system had been disabled before the robbery. Yet upon ...

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Gods and Beasts (Alex Morrow Series #3)

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Overview

It's the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK-47. An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunman fill bags with cash, then carries them to the door. He opens the door and bows his head; the robber fires off the AK-47, tearing the grandfather in two.

DS Alex Morrow arrives on the scene and finds that the alarm system had been disabled before the robbery. Yet upon investigation, none of the employees can be linked to the gunman. And the grandfather-a life-long campaigner for social justice-is above reproach. As Morrow searches for the killer, she discovers a hidden, sinister political network. Soon it is chillingly clear: no corner of the city is safe, and her involvement will go deeper than she could ever have imagined.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
At the start of Scottish author Mina’s excellent third crime novel featuring Det. Sgt. Alex Morrow (after 2011’s The End of the Wasp Season), a lone gunman enters a Glasgow post office, where he orders the patrons to lie on the floor. An elderly gentleman hands his young grandson to a stranger and gets up to assist the robber by filling bags with cash. The gunman then cuts the old man down with a hail of bullets from his AK-47 pistol. Meanwhile, looming budget cuts and police layoffs lure two of Morrow’s subordinates into stealing a pile of dirty drug money. Finally, a former labor hero turned politician is caught up in a sex scandal with a 17-year-old female staffer. While Mina keeps Alex’s life outside of work mostly on the back burner, she ups the stakes by taking us into the dark, beating heart of modern Glasgow, where the real deals are struck and the spoils divided. (Feb.)
Val McDermid
PRAISE FOR GODS AND BEASTS:

"If you don't love Denise Mina, you don't love crime fiction. I guarantee Gods and Beasts will be one of your top books of the year."

Library Journal
During an armed robbery in a Glasgow post office, a grandfather inexplicably steps from the queue to help the gunman before being shot to smithereens. DS Alex Morrow is on the case, despite her exhaustion from having newborn twins. But what begins as a murder investigation turns into a maze of conspiracy and lies. A witness claims the grandfather recognized his killer, but the dead man's widow says it's impossible. Meanwhile, one of Morrow's trusted officers flirts with corruption, and her half-brother, Danny, a notorious gangster, is connected to a scandal that threatens a prominent politician. Although these story lines don't always appear to connect, Mina deftly stitches them together in time for a powerful climax. VERDICT In this third Alex Morrow procedural (after The End of the Wasp Season) Mina again plumbs the depths of the grungy Scottish metropolis, capturing political posturing, class differences, and familial dynamics with equal aplomb. At its center is the cranky, sympathetic Morrow, fast becoming one of the most intriguing cops in crime fiction. Fans of smart, character-driven procedurals will want to snatch this one up. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/12.]—Annabel Mortensen, Skokie P.L., IL
Kirkus Reviews
Who would shoot an inoffensive retiree in the middle of an otherwise routine robbery? One minute, geology student Martin Pavel is queued up at the post office; the next, he's lying on the floor at the command of a man with a mask, an AK-47 and a very short temper. Yet Martin is a lot luckier than Brendan Lyons, the retired bus driver who offered to help the gunman collect the loot and got thoroughly shot for his trouble. It seems clear that the robber recognized the old man, but even so, why would he feel the need to kill him? DS Alexandra Morrow would love to bear down hard on the case, but as usual, there are other problems. After pulling over dicey driver Hugh Boyle, DC Tamsin Leonard and DC George Wilder have found £200,000 concealed in his car; instead of turning it in, Wilder's had the bright idea of splitting it between themselves; and the surprisingly resourceful Boyle has photographed them in possession of the loot. So, even though Alex gets a promising lead that links the gunman to the anonymous figure who menaced householder Anita Costello three years ago, Strathclyde's finest is hardly enjoying its finest hour. Higher up in the social ranks (though equally far down the ethical scale), Labour MP Kenny Gallagher is battling rumors that he's taken party volunteer Jill Bowman, 17, under more than his wing--rumors that are particularly hard to scotch since they're true. As Gallagher faces the ruin of his career, readers will wonder how Alex (The End of the Wasp Season, 2011, etc.) can possibly tie these cases together. Though the final surprise doesn't have the snap of logical inevitability, it's depressingly realistic.
The Barnes & Noble Review

The Scottish writer Denise Mina may be regarded as a crime novelist, but that has never been the whole story. From her first novel, Garnethill, Mina has resisted neat classification. Her fiction, set mainly in Glasgow, is too subtle to be "tartan noir." Her protagonists are often female, but they are too complicated to be heroine sleuths, too difficult to pin down. Paddy Meehan, for example, who first appeared as a watchful girl in Garnethill, became the prime investigator in Field of Blood. Now Meehan, an established journalist, is barely glimpsed in Gods and Beasts, while Detective Sergeant Alex Morrow, familiar from The End of the Wasp Season, is Mina's chief character.

More confident these days in her hard-won authority, Morrow is as shrewd as ever, whether she is studying a suspect or a fellow cop. "It felt strange to have that double perspective," she reflects as she listens to an anxious, perhaps guilty, colleague, "...to have to calculate the gulf between what was said and what was meant" (a Jamesian observation that also sums up what Mina does so well). Gods and Beasts opens, however, in a straightforward way with a crime, or rather its aftermath. A young man sits on a curb, in shock, cradling a toddler, "...koala-clamped to his chest," strangers welded together by casual violence. During the armed robbery of a post office, the child's grandfather has been shot to death. Martin Pavel, a bystander, is left holding the boy and replaying the bloody image: "...automatic fire, red explosions on the old man's back, the tilt of his torso, the greasy slide."

What follows is equally impressionistic, a series of images ricocheting off a stunned consciousness. Martin registers a paramedic kneeling before him, the hospital where he and the child are "[p]ushed in a canvas wheelchair, through the A&E waiting room, not very clean, not very nice." Then a cubicle: "Time passed. Clocks ticked and trolleys rolled. Nurses shoes squeaked by beyond the curtain." And soon the departure of the boy with his distraught mother, followed by the arrival of DS Alex Morrow and DC Harris, whose questions tether and calm Martin's unruly recollections. It is gradually apparent that the shooting was coincidental but not random — the gunman and the grandfather seemed to recognize each other — and that Martin himself is a conundrum. An American who sounds Scottish, who is well educated, tattooed, and a compulsive runner; familiar with guns, gifted with accents, and haunted by details, he is an invaluable yet oddly suspect witness. He is also a stray exotic on the harsh, treacherously shifting terrain that Mina so masterfully depicts.

Populated by criminals of varying rank, by cops and politicians of shaky integrity, and by the battered casualties of violence and neglect, Mina's Glasgow is an intimate place where favor swapping and palm greasing blur the line between legal and illegal. Where, indeed, DS Alex Morrow's half brother is the "celebrity thug" Danny McGrath. "[T]hey were part of each other, deeply," Morrow knows. "She became a police officer because Danny was a thug?"

Nothing escapes Morrow's eye, least of all herself, and as Mina deftly joins the overlapping edges of a satisfying plot, her depiction of characters reading each other — and often manipulating each other — is as thrilling as any action scene. "It was blind panic," Morrow observes when she confronts a petty criminal with evidence that will have him killed unless he informs: "He glared at her, saw she was his only hope of living past January." Upstairs, in her boss's office, she is similarly clear- eyed, noting "...two very senior officers sitting with McKechnie-all on first-name, golf-course terms'. They were going to clean out the entire department top to bottom, shave off redundancies that way, smear her if they had to..."

Two of Morrow's own officers have been corrupted (the revelation of a third is one of the novel's biggest shocks), and corruption, sexual and venal, is at the heart of a parallel plot revolving around the city's powerful Labour Party leader. "[I]t was all consenting, it was all grown up," Kennie Gallagher protests. "They couldn't accuse him of doing anything except what everyone else wanted to do." But Kennie knew Brendan Lyons, the murdered grandfather and fellow party member, and now Lyons's family is being threatened. Gangland politics, party politics, Gallagher's marriage, Glasgow's shredded working class; each thread is connected to the single violent act that opens the novel. With consummate ease and flawless timing, Mina untangles the knot, leaving intact the enmeshed world she has so convincingly created.

Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Reviewer: Anna Mundow

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316188524
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 2/26/2013
  • Series: Alex Morrow Series , #3
  • Pages: 311
  • Sales rank: 39694
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Denise Mina
Denise Mina is the author of The End of the Wasp Season, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, Field of Blood, Deception, and the Garnethill trilogy, the first installment of which won her the John Creasey Memorial Prize for best first crime novel. She lives in Glasgow.
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 7 )
Rating Distribution

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  • Posted Fri Apr 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    A must read for those who want to experience reality in a fiction book!

    I so recommend this book to all. Denise Mina made me feel as I was actually there and experiencing the reality of life there. I am looking forward to the continuation of the Alex Morrow series!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu Apr 04 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    I am not liking this book. I'm reading it but bored with the ch

    I am not liking this book. I'm reading it but bored with the characters. No charisma.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Mar 23 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Will

    Its ok but i havet had this tjing for a year

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sun Mar 24 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Holly

    Wht do u mean

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Tue Mar 19 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Mar 02 00:00:00 EST 2013

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Sun Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    No text was provided for this review.

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