The Red Road

Book four in the Alex Morrow series

Power, abuse, love gone horribly wrong - and a crime that stretches back two decades...

A girl who has seen more darkness than most.

A Scottish lawyer waiting to be killed.

A fingerprint discovered at a murder scene, from a man who couldn't possibly have been there.

As DI Alex Morrow acts as a witness in the trial of arms dealer Mark Lynch, who ranks among the most brutal and damaged of the criminals she's known, she's called to the death of a young businessman.

Her investogation uncovers a vicious network of power and corruption that reaches back to Glasgow on the night Princess Diana died. 

And to a fourteen-year-old girl sat in a car with a dead body, the murder weapon still in her hand.

Reviews

“If anyone can make you root for the murderer, it’s Denise Mina, whose defiantly unsentimental novels are less concerned with personal guilt than with the social evils that create criminals and the predators who nurture them.”

Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times

"...this is that rare thing, a crime novel that invites, and benefits from, a second reading.”

Allan Massie in The Scotsman

The only problem with reading a Denise Mina book is that it goes too fast! I try to savor it, but alas, I can’t stop turning the pages.
— Chris Witkowski, GoodReads

More about the book

Listen to Denise talking to Mariella Frostrup on Radio 4's Open Book.

In the interview she explains why she felt it was important to tell the story of a young teenage girl groomed for sex and part of the novel is set on the night that Diana, Princess of Wales died.

More about the Red Road flats

The Red Road flats, constructed in the late 1960s, were a famous landmark in Glasgow.

The last six of the tower blocks were demolished in October 2015 and thousands of people turned out to see them come down. 

Creation and demolition of the flats

See archive photos and architectural information about the Red Road housing estate.

This collection is on the Historic Environment Scotland Canmore website.

Living at Red Road

A Glasgow University project called Multi-storey Memories is collecting people’s remembrances of living in the Red Road flats.

The website has a brief history of the flats, photos and links to other articles.

Press Association video of the controlled explosion that demolished the last Red Road flats.

The End of the Red Road is a collection of photos, an essay and two short documentaries by Chris Leslie.

One film features people’s memories of the underground bar and bingo hall; the other is about Jamal, a Kurdish Iraqi asylum-seeker who lived for eight months in one block of flats after everyone else had left.

The End of the Red Road website

When the flats were destroyed, Denise wrote this article for The Guardian newspaper about what they meant to Glaswegians.

 


Get the book

Read the first chapter and buy the book

Published by Orion Books in February 2014