Book review: Conviction, by Denise Mina

Denise Mina’s work is increasingly intriguing. She has written detective novels and police procedural novels, and recently a marvellous non-fiction fiction. Her newest novel might be described as a fictional non-fiction. It is a thriller that often evokes an almost Hitchcock-like air of paranoia, doubt, double identities, sexual frisson, gadding around over several countries from Fort William to Venice, with sinister train journeys and mordant wit. I half expected a character called “Denise Mina” to make a cameo appearance, possibly carrying a small ukulele, especially since the last line of the novel is: “That could mean only one thing: I was going to have to write this f***ing book.”

It is narrated by Anna McDonald. On the very first page we learn that she is not Anna McDonald, but Sophie Bukaran. For reasons that become evident, and for very real reasons of fear, she has chosen a new identity. She has an older husband who is about to leave her, two children who are about to go off with their new Mummy, and she is obsessed with a particular podcast called Death And The Dana. But the intrigue with the podcast is not just a psychological deferral from facing the situation she is now in: she knew one of the victims. The Dana was a luxury yacht, and the entire family died in a mysterious accident which might not have been an accident. Anna knew the father, Leon Parker, a bit of a wide boy to say the least, in one of her previous lives. The podcast – shades of Serial or S-Town – raises ambiguities but no answers. The woman convicted of the crime could not possibly have committed it. There are wealthy and ruthless people involved. As Anna/Sophie becomes embroiled in the story, she also becomes determined to solve it.

One cliché of reviewing is to call something “more than a crime novel”. I have always found that patronising and simplistic. Whether it is the forensic analysis of emerging social mores that Val McDermid has deployed, or the beleaguered goodness of James Runcie’s series of novels, the crime novel has always been the novel: at its heart is trying to feel like someone else. The manner in which Mina achieves this is in crafting a novel which, like its predecessor, The Long Drop, is fascinated with story above all else. Part of the podcast – and Mina writes well in the breezy, breathless style; the regular cliff-hanger and the question which is actually an assertion – involves a diver’s video which might suggest a supernatural explanation. The Dana was purportedly cursed, and the swerve into the Gothic is very cleverly done and cleverly subverted. At her lowest ebb Anna/Sophie realises: “I was in the wrong story. I was in a family saga about a May-to-December couple and their two eccentric daughters. Our troubles were minor, our conundrums comedic. Only I wasn’t in that story at all. I was in a love story and I wasn’t even the central character. I was the ‘all’ their love would overcome”.