Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina

This is a book about families. Happy families are all alike, but in Mina’s world, all unhappy ones are really screwed up.

The title, as we later find out, is a quote from Aristotle (Politics 1 l.1235), that those who live outside the city walls are either gods or beasts. The problem is not what is outside the walls, but what is within them.

The problem is that the family can no longer protect; an older man, buying stamps, is caught up in a Post Office armed robbery and brutally murdered in front of his small grandson moments before the narrative opens. Two PCs open a car’s boot and are later sent a compromising photograph. A Labour MP is offered evidence of his corrupt behaviour, never seen nor properly acknowledged and hides behind his wife. A young American, covered in tattoos, has immense wealth but has to evade the vultures he has for parents by living in Glasgow. And DS Alex Morrow craves the shelter of her home, husband and small children, the same home she couldn’t bear to enter in Still Midnight, but never gets there, sailing like a blonde Ulysses around the city, getting nowhere.

Denise Mina runs these stories in parallel and you are fully two thirds of the way through the book before they appear to converge. Like Greek plays, the violence occurs offstage, and before the police arrive the culprits are long gone. Some crime fiction reviews offer a gore rating, but while this is a book about violence, the misframing of the action puts the consequences centre stage, but leaves the causes ambiguous. The one act of on-stage violence is intense and violating as a result.

A running theme is the corrupting power of drug money. This has entered the arteries of the city like a poison and infected those who should be gods – politicians, the police, parents – transforming them into beasts. The slimy Glasgow Hillhead MP Kenny Gallagher bears no resemblance to George Galloway, as the seat no longer exists.

The book does miss the character of Bannerman, who was central to Still Midnight and The End Of The Wasp Season. He is now in charge of Police Professional Standards in the area.  Like other threatening characters – Godot, Fortinbras – he is about to arrive for the whole second half of the book.

Alex Morrow, who was pregnant throughout The End Of The Wasp Season, features relatively little in this book having only recently returned to work after the birth of her miraculous twin sons. Her Manichean half-brother, who resembles but contrasts with her, and links all evils just as Morrow is the moral centre. The interplay of the two marks the impossibility of families keeping both the gods and beasts out of the city.