The Pimp and the Preacher Book

Really enjoyed this book. Reading Denise Mina, for we Glaswegians, has some of the same fascination as watching Taggart on TV. We're always looking to notice the places we know - look, the victim lived in Lawrence St! But thankfully, Denise Mina's writing is a lot better than the Taggart team's acting. This is the third Paddy Meehan (a Glasgow journalist) story - though I hardly remember the others, they seem so long ago - and she has moved to Lansdowne Crescent in the West End. Ah the memories….

One advantage of having a journalist as your protagonist is that it frees the author from some of the constraints imposed on police detection - the journalist can be much more unorthodox.

Several different stories take place in the book, which is set in 1990. The main story is about the murder of two journalists - a writer and a photographer, with possible IRA implications. The journalist had been a mentor to Paddy, and has now left her everything in his will. But with the bequest comes danger, Paddy now becoming a target of the same people. A second story involves the release from prison of a child murderer, whose conviction, on lesser charges, Paddy had been associated with. Journalists from all over the country want to talk to him, and Paddy may be the conduit. And then there are developments in Paddy's family life, with her sister the nun having doubts and Paddy herself moving to the west end of the city, a far cry from her upbringing.

When I started the book, I had felt it was a little light and spent too much time revisiting the previous stories, but in fact those earlier passages turned out to be part of the greater whole. The various stories pull you in more and more and end up intersecting the way the best written books do. Well worth reading.