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Bibliothèque | Type de matériel | Numéro de cote topographique | Statut |
|---|---|---|---|
Recherche en cours... Punta Gorda | Audiobooks | MYSTERY FIC MINA CD | Recherche en cours... Inconnu |
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A standalone psychological thriller from the acclaimed author of the Alex Morrow novels that exposes the dark hearts of the guilty ... and the innocent.The "trial of the century" in 1950's Glasgow is over. Peter Manuel has been found guilty of a string of murders and is waiting to die by hanging. But every good crime story has a beginning. Manuel's starts with the murder of William Watt's family. Looking no further that Watt himself, the police are convinced he's guilty. Desperate to clear his name, Watt turns to Manuel, a career criminal who claims to have information that will finger the real killer. As Watt seeks justice with the cagey Manuel's help, everyone the pair meets has blood on their hands as they sell their version of the truth.The Long Drop is an explosive novel about guilt, innocence, and the power of a good story to hide the difference.
Critiques (2)
Critique du Guardian
This true crime story about Peter Manuel, 'the Beast of Birkenshaw', alternates between a bizarre pub crawl with a relative of the victims and his trial for murder in 1958 At around 2am on 1 January 1958, in merry mood during Hogmanay celebrations, the serial killer Peter Manuel, then 30, took the telephone from his sister Theresa and sang Al Martino's "Here in My Heart" down the line to her friend Mary, a nurse on duty at Glasgow's Southern General hospital. Approximately three hours later, Manuel took a short walk to a bungalow in Uddingston, seven miles outside Glasgow, where he murdered the Smart family -- father, mother, 10-year-old son -- in their beds, shooting each in the head. Over the following few days he made repeated visits to the scene, making himself at home among the bodies, and making sure to open a tin of salmon for the cat. It is notable that the crime writer Denise Mina, in her semi-fictionalised account of the Manuel case, avoids such tempting "novelistic" details. She leaves out the song and doesn't make much of the cat. Hers is a tighter focus. Manuel, "the Beast of Birkenshaw", murdered eight people in Lanarkshire between 1956 and 1958, and is therefore a ripe subject for drama -- hence the recent ITV series In Plain Sight. But Mina is interested, in particular, in his relationship with William Watt; Watt (rightly) suspected Manuel of killing his wife, daughter and sister-in-law, a triple homicide of which the bereaved man himself had, for a time, been under suspicion. Watt, therefore, had every reason to hate him and wish to see him hang. Instead, they went drinking. The Long Drop takes its title from a method of hanging. It also has the ring of a bar name; Mina's narrative alternates between Manuel's murder trial and that strange 11-hour pub crawl on which he and Watt embarked in December 1957. The book is a radical reworking of her 2013 play Driving Manuel. In that theatrical treatment, Watt was presented as an innocent. In The Long Drop, based in part on court transcripts, Mina explores a theory -- touched on by Manuel during the trial -- that Watt was complicit in the deaths of his own family. To say more would be a spoiler, but one wonders about the ethics of such speculation. Those alleged to be involved are no longer alive to defend themselves. Mina's detective fiction has won many awards. This is her first novel-length foray into true crime, a genre especially popular in her home town, where it sometimes seems that no bookshop is complete without its shelf of gangsters, sutured and booted, looming from covers. Glasgow, as she writes, is "a city that reveres angry men", but Manuel, a psychopath who badly wanted to be seen as a hard man, has never attracted reverence; the subject of appalled fascination, he is still loathed in Scotland. Mina only rarely tells this story from his point of view. She seems more at ease in summoning the Glasgow of the period, "a memory of a memory of a place", all fag smoke and black stone and wet streets in which even the gang graffiti -- "Come On, Die Young" -- has a certain fatalism. This "shadow city" she peoples with real figures from the time, including the razor thug Billy Fullerton and crime boss Dandy McKay, relishing the creative act of putting flesh on their unlovely bones. The best three chapters in the book are told from the perspective of minor characters: the father of the teenager Isabelle Cooke, strangled with her own bra; Manuel's mother, Bridget; and Watt's sister-in-law, Nettie, cowering away from the killer in an outside toilet. Curious that the inner life of Manuel himself does not receive such close imaginative recreation. Perhaps Mina considers him unknowable, or is unwilling to think herself into the murk of his head. Manuel wrote his name in blood across postwar Scotland. Mina's attempt to trace that signature in ink is interesting but perhaps ultimately unnecessary. It was, in any case, indelible. - Denise Mina.
Critique du New York Review of Books
HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty, by S. Jonathan Bass. (Liveright, $26.95.) A young black man wrongly accused of killing a policeman in Alabama in 1957 faced a 44-year legal battle; his painstakingly documented story illuminates the racial justice system. RISING STAR: The Making of Barack Obama, by David J. Garrow. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $45.) This long, deeply reported but gratuitously snarly biography argues that the young president-to-be subordinated everything, including love, to a politically expedient journey-to-blackness narrative. THE GOLDEN LEGEND, by Nadeem Aslam. (Knopf, $27.95.) In Aslam's powerful and engrossing fifth novel, set in an imaginary Pakistani city ruled by mob violence, sectarianism and intolerance, the principal characters become hunted fugitives. Their integrity and courage nevertheless provide hope. THE UNRULY CITY: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution, by Mike Rapport. (Basic Books, $32.) What accounts for differing degrees of upheaval when societies are in crisis? A historian's examination of the 18th-century revolutions in urban Britain, America and France is both readable and scholarly. MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: Stories, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this slim (seven stories) but beguilingly irresistible book, Murakami whips up a melancholy soufflé about wounded men who can't hold on to the women they love. SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE: America's Violent Birth, by Holger Hoock. (Crown, $30.) This important and revelatory book adopts violence as its central analytical and narrative focus, forcing readers to confront the visceral realities of a conflict too often bathed in warm, nostalgic light. The Revolution in this telling is a war like any other. CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas, by Pénélope Bagieu. (First Second, $24.99.) Bagieu uses the entire range of her medium, graphite, to show - in drawings both exuberant and sad - how a Baltimore girl named Ellen Cohen became Mama Cass. FIRST LOVE, by Gwendoline Riley. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) A 30-something writer falls in love with and marries a man who says he doesn't "have a nice bone in my body." This dark, funny novel displays its author's mastery of scrupulous psychological detail and ear for the ways love inverts itself into cruelty. THE LONG DROP, by Denise Mina. (Little, Brown, $26.) In a departure from her usual series, Mina's new novel is based on a real crime spree that horrified Glasgow in the late 1950s. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
