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The long drop : a novel

Mina, Denise. (Author).

True story: 1958, Glasgow. Peter Manuel broke into a suburban villa in Glasgow and murdered three members of the Watt family. William Watt, the father, a successful businessman and entrepreneur, was arrested and jailed for the crime, but the police couldn't find enough evidence to charge him and he was released. Watt was determined to clear his own name and let it be known that he would pay for information. Peter Manuel contacted him and offered to help. The two men met in a bar and spent the next twelve hours drinking together. No one knows what happened that night. When Manuel was finally arrested weeks later on another murder charge, he represented himself in what the newspapers called the trial of the century.

Book  - 2017
FIC Mina
2 copies / 0 on hold

Available Copies by Location

Location
Community Centre Available
Victoria Available
  • ISBN: 9781443452519
  • Physical Description 236 pages ; 24 cm
  • Edition First Canadian edition.
  • Publisher [Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], 2017.

Additional Information

Syndetic Solutions - New York Times Review for ISBN Number 9781443452519
The Long Drop
The Long Drop
by Mina, Denise
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New York Times Review

The Long Drop

New York Times


June 8, 2017

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company

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