At the outset of Mina's stellar first in a new series, two men in army fatigues, Pat and Eddy, break into the suburban Glasgow house of the Anwars, a Muslim family, demanding to speak to a man none of the family has ever heard of. The pair abduct the father, Aamir, after Pat shoots Aamir's attractive teenage daughter in the hand. Det. Sgt. Alex Morrow wonders if religious bigotry prompted the crime, but she soon realizes that money is the key when Pat and Eddy demand a 2 million ransom, an exorbitant sum for a family of modest means. As Morrow and her partner, Det. Sgt. Grant Bannerman, dig deeper into the lives of the Anwars, particularly middle child Omar, they begin to untangle a complex web of intrigue. Meanwhile, the frantic kidnappers realize too late they're out of their depth. Mina (Slip of the Knife), who's as much at ease with cops as she is with the people they chase, laces this potent crime thriller with colorful Scottish slang and delivers a sucker-punch climax. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

How do domestic abuse and chronic alcoholism drive entire neighborhoods to ruin? How can drug trafficking and ethnic violence transform a vast public housing complex into a war zone? These are the sorts of questions raised by the gutsy Scottish writer Denise Mina in two series of sociologically freighted novels set in Glasgow. Each comes with its own locally born and bred (and nearly broken) female protagonist, one a social worker and the other a reporter, who approach crime by going to the root of it and asking how a civilized society can allow such injustice to flourish. STILL MIDNIGHT (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99) opens a third series in the same vein, challenging us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even the most close-knit family. Terror grips the household of a shopkeeper named Aamir Anwar when two masked gunmen burst into the family's modest home clamoring for "Bob," a name that means nothing to anyone. In their frustration, the bumbling pair make off with the patriarch after accidentally shooting his daughter, leaving the others wondering how to come up with a £2 million ransom. Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant with the Strathclyde police force, is another of Mina's prickly heroines, the kind you love at your own risk. Burdened with personal tragedy and embattled by class and gender politics, Morrow is abrasive, ill-mannered and tough to like. She's also the smartest cop in the shop, the only one sensitive enough to interpret the subtle vagaries of human behavior. It's a huge pleasure to watch her crack the "family myths and fables" that blood relatives instinctively adopt as protection from outsiders - and as a way of preserving themselves from members of their own clan. Mina makes a great deal of the racial prejudices that poison community police work, but her grimly funny plot really turns on the eccentricities of her unpredictable characters. If you don't count his newborn grandchild, Aamir is the only true innocent here, a tidy little man whose mania for cleanliness and order is his way of keeping chaos at bay. The amateur villains of this tragicomic piece are drawn with the same wry compassion and bleak humor, even the clumsy idiot who is so startled by the beauty of Aamir's teenage daughter that he shoots her. However this family pulls together after these bizarre misadventures, the safe and orderly world Aamir built to protect it will never be the same. The voice of the narrator - low, intense and soaked in melancholy - is what hooks us in KNOWN TO EVIL (Riverhead, $25.95), the second mystery by Walter Mosley to feature Leonid McGill, an exboxer and onetime fixer for the mob. "I gave up my dirty tricks with the intention of doing the right thing in my business and my life," McGill tells us in a world-weary tone that's music to our ears. "But that never changed my brawling style." This reformed bad boy currently works out of an Art Deco Manhattan office building as a private eye, but it's hard to make amends to society when most of your clients and contacts have underworld connections. Harder still when the wife you don't love, the lover who left you, and two criminally inclined children are creating constant distractions. McGill's shady past comes back to bite him when he does a favor for a power broker he refers to as "the Big Man" by keeping an eye on a young woman of blameless reputation. When the P.I. arrives on her doorstep, the place is crawling with cops, and before he knows it, McGill is mixed up in a murder. Mosley uses his plot like clothesline, stringing up scenes that barely touch but look great flapping in the wind. His characters are something else, though. Like McGill, they live and breathe genre lingo, even when they're just talking with their fists. Philip Kerr transports us to Nazi Germany in 1934 in IF THE DEAD RISE NOT (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), a solid addition to the great crime novels that make up the Berlin Noir trilogy and, like them, strategically positioned on the margins of World War II. Bernie Gunther, the maverick homicide cop who bolted the force during the political purges of 1933, is installed as a house detective at a fashionable hotel, dealing with petty thefts and keeping an eye out for "joy girls." Yet this dull job turns deadly when Bernie is caught up in the German Olympic Organizing Committee's machinations to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympiad by covering up its systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Leaving the intrigue to the flashy guys in espionage novels, Bernie arms himself with a strong right hook and a tough-guy line of patter to make it out of this one alive. That well-bred voice cursing a blue streak in INVISIBLE BOY (Grand Central, $24.99) can belong only to Madeline Dare, the renegade socialite from Oyster Bay, Long Island, who solves murders and spits venom in Cornelia Read's offbeat mysteries, it's the early 1990s and Madeline is living in Chelsea and working part time taking phone orders for a publisher when her cousin Cate talks her into helping to restore an abandoned family cemetery in Queens. Madeline is so distressed when she discovers a child's skeleton in the underbrush that she attaches herself to the police investigation. Although Read gives her heroine a strong personal motive for delving into this sad case, the soulsearching and hand-wringing get a bit maudlin. We're ever so much happier when Madeline takes a break from her quest to talk trash with her foul-mouthed friends. Denise Mina's latest novel challenges us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even a close-knit family.

Eddy and Pat, two Glasgow yobs, are hired to snatch a man named Bob from a modest home in a Glasgow suburb and hold him for a two-million-pound ransom. They botch the job, finding no one named Bob, accidentally shooting a teenage girl, and snatching the girl's father, a Ugandan émigré who owns a none-too-prosperous convenience store. Police-department sexism leads to DS Alex Morrow's dim rival, Grant Bannerman, being placed in charge of the investigation; but Alex's efforts uncover the only leads in the case. An award-winning crime novelist, Mina knows her gritty hometown, and Still Midnight offers a stunning portrait of transcendent bleakness. Alex is close to a breakdown; curiously, we don't learn the full why for 270 pages. The kidnap victim is haunted by his mother's rape as they fled Uganda. Even Eddy and Pat are tormented. Similarly, Glasgow is vividly portrayed as an avatar of urban poverty, violence, and utter despair; the lashing rains and raw winds of October in Scotland only serve to deepen the sense of desperation. Grim but compelling.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist

This is John Creasey Dagger Award winner Mina's (www.denisemina.co.uk) eighth crime novel, following Slip of the Knife (2008), also available from BBC Audiobooks America and read by Glasgow-born actress/musician Jane MacFarlane. In it, an elderly shop owner is kidnapped during what appears to be a botched home invasion. Alex Morrow should have been lead on the case, but a supporting role lands her in the middle of a political morass at least as complicated as the crime. Mina's gritty, precise prose contains some enviably poetic imagery. The working-class characters of Glasgow are enlivened by MacFarlane's versatile accents and husky tones. Though not Mina's strongest novel, this police procedural is still a worthy addition to the current crop of international mysteries. Frequent vulgar language may offend some. [The Reagan Arthur: Little, Brown hc was recommended for "fans of Ian Rankin and anyone who enjoys a good police procedural," LJ 3/1/10.-Ed.]-Janet Martin, Southern Pines P.L., NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Mina trades the glum intensity of her exposs of Glasgow's seamy side (Slip of the Knife, 2007, etc.) for a police procedural that reveals strikingly similar results. It might have been a routine home invasion. Two men in balaclavas, backed up by a third waiting in the car, push their way into a house, demand to speak to Bob, shoot a family member in the hand and, when they see Bob's not there, leave with the head of the family, for whose safe return they demand 2 million as "payback. For Afghanistan." Only the details don't make any sense. Ugandan-born shopkeeper Aamir Anwar and his family apparently have nothing to do with Afghanistan, with anyone named Bob, or with the remotest likelihood of assembling such a staggering ransom. When Strathclyde CID gets the case, it goes not to DS Alex Morrow, who's next in line as lead detective, but to her despised rival, DS Grant Bannerman, who shunts Alex into meaningless busywork and ignores the all-important lead she hands him. The heroine's home life, if you can call it that, is as dispiriting as her professional life. She dreads heading home to the husband who tells her, "I hate who you make me." After a whirlwind first movement, Mina settles in to what she does beststripping her heroes and villains bare of every self-serving piety and protective illusion and exposing what's beneath. Little suspense, less mystery, but a startling exploration of characters who stubbornly refuse to stay in the boxes they've been assigned. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.