Conviction

by Denise Mina

It’s early morning, and Anna is listening to a true crime podcast. It’s one of her favorite activities, especially in the quiet time before her family wakes up and the tasks of the day begin.

This podcast—Death of the Dana —tells the story of an explosion that sank a luxury yacht, killing a wealthy father and his two teenage children. Then Anna recognizes the father’s name: it’s someone she knew long ago. Though he knew her under a different name: Anna left that name behind when she escaped a situation that she hopes no one can trace to her current life.

Then her family arrives at breakfast: Anna’s husband Hamish and their two young daughters. Anna is expecting her best friend, Estelle, to come by soon to pick her up for their regular yoga class. When someone knocks at the door, it’s Estelle all right—but she’s not dressed for yoga. In fact, she’s dressed to run off to Portugal with Anna’s husband. And they’re taking the girls with them.

This novel plunges us through past and present, interspersed with large segments of the podcast script. Anna thinks the podcast author has gotten details drastically wrong: the truth has been manipulated by Gretchen, who was Anna’s nemesis in the past. And when a neighbour’s photo goes viral, Anna fears Gretchen will find her again. Anna’s life, and her daughters’ lives,, are now in peril.

Confronting Anna’s past, searching for answers in both past and present, the novel takes us on quite a ride (and hits us with a twist near the end.)

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966, and Glasgow plays a role in all her novels. Her books are considered “Scottish noir;” they’re dark stories featuring damaged and flawed characters, often including women who are struggling to overcome victimization and to take control of their lives.

She didn’t start out expecting to be a writer. Her father was an oil engineer, so she attended a variety of schools as her family moved around Europe for his job. She left school  at 16 and took a series of jobs (bartender, cook, meat factory employee, and nursing home helper). At twenty-one she decided to enter college, after taking night courses to qualify for Glasgow University’s law program. She taught law and criminology courses before beginning a PhD program in the 1990s at Strathclyde University, focusing her research on the prevalence of mental-illness diagnoses in female criminal offenders, and on false-memory syndrome.  

As a way of exploring the topics she was studying, she started drafting a novel. This draft eventually grabbed the interest of an agent and a publisher. When Garnethill was accepted for publication, she dropped out of her doctoral program to focus on writing. At their first meeting, her publisher advised her not to give up her day job. “However,” she says, “as I’d been living on £6,000 a year as a PhD student, I reckoned giving up wasn’t going to make much difference! The first year, I made about £20,000 and I felt as though I was a millionaire.”

Garnethill quickly became a bestseller, winning the 1998 John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best first crime novel from the Crime Writers’ Association.

Mina’s writing quickly took off from there. She published two more novels in the Garnethill series,  and since then has written a five-novel series featuring Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, another three-novel series featuring journalist Paddy Meehan, and several standalone novels, of which Conviction (published in 2019) is the most recent.  She has also written plays and has scripted several graphic novels.

Denise Mina lives in Glasgow with her partner (a forensic psychologist) and their two sons. Her next novel, The Less Dead, is scheduled for release in August 2020.

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