The End of the Wasp Season: A Novel (Alex Morrow)

“An accomplished, complex, and absolutely compelling psychological crime novel, The End of the Wasp Season is expertly paced with just the right amount of grisliness to make it disturbingly authentic. Ms. Mina’s characters are deliciously creepy and memorable, but it’s the addictive darkness of her raconteur’s prose that makes this one of the few must-have, must-read crime books of the year. Not for nothing has she been called the queen of Scottish crime writing. This is another gem to be added to her crown.”

“Her mind slid softly into the dark warm. A sudden crack of floorboard at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes snapped open. She raised her head from the pillow, the better to hear. A shoe scuffing over carpet, amplified by the stairwell and a hissed two-word instruction. A high voice. A woman’s voice. ‘Go on.’”

The intense beginning to The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina begins with a young woman discovering she is not alone in her home. . . .

When a notorious millionaire banker, Lars Anderson, hangs himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their stately home in Kent, his death attracts little or no sympathy. No doubt much of this apathy is due to the fact that he was responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession.

Meanwhile, in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow, a young woman, Sarah Erroll is found savagely murdered. The community is stunned by what appears to be a vicious, random attack. Heavily pregnant with desperately wanted twins, DS Alex Morrow— first introduced to us in the critically acclaimed, Still Midnight—is called in to investigate and soon discovers that there is more to Sarah’s horrific murder than it first seems, and that a tangled web of lies lurks behind the murder. It’s a web that will eventually spiral through Alex’s own home, the local community, and ultimately right back to a swinging rope, hundreds of miles away.

On the other side of town, young Thomas Anderson is called into the headmaster’s office at his boarding school to be told that his tyrannical father, Lars, has committed suicide. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of numb shock. The head of the household is dead, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief, but relief. Was Lars the monster they all thought him to be? Or was there something else, something more sinister behind the death?

As Alex slowly unravels the connections between the two cases, she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home life collides with potentially disastrous consequences.

A pregnant investigator due to have twins is as rare as hair on Kojak’s head, but this is just one of the enjoyable oddities sprinkled throughout the story, which is more of a whydunnit than a whodunit.

An accomplished, complex, and absolutely compelling psychological crime novel, The End of the Wasp Season is expertly paced with just the right amount of grisliness to make it disturbingly authentic.

Ms. Mina’s characters are deliciously creepy and memorable, but it’s the addictive darkness of her raconteur’s prose that makes this one of the few must-have, must-read crime books of the year. Not for nothing has she been called the queen of Scottish crime writing. This is another gem to be added to her crown.