To The Last Page

You've got to hand it to Michael Mackenzie; he can script a scene of high drama with a cinematic quality, as in the scene of furore and pandemonium that erupts in the prologue of Woman Who Kill during the reading of a verdict of a notorious case that convicts a woman of the brutal killing of her family. That sets the tone for a subject that interests the main character of his running series, Professor of Criminology Anna Scavolini: how society views women who kill much more harshly or to a different standard than men. The high drama doesn't end there, or course. Mackenzie is also a dab hand at plotting, pacing, has a terrific ear for dialogue and, well, you get the whole package in this one. At this stage a 'but' or 'however' might be expected and I do have one minor personal misgiving that I'll come to later. For most readers however, the only condition worth mentioning is that it would be better if you had read the earlier books in the Anna Scavolini seri...

With his usual clarity, precision and way of drawing you immediately into a story, it doesn't take too long for M.R. Mackenzie to put names to the three women carrying a body to a shallow grave in the woods in the prologue of Bury Your Secrets . There are a few other elements that encourage you to read further, not least of which obviously is to find out who is dead and what went so badly wrong that the three ordinary young women on a break to a remote Scottish town need to bring a body to the woods in the dark of night. If it turned out to be Hazel's errant and arrogant husband Matthew you wouldn't be surprised but it seems unlikely. Yes, he might have been caught on cheating on Hazel with a blonde secretary in their own bedroom, but he hasn't been invited on the girls' trip evidently and she doesn't seem ready to resort to murder. Rather, Hazel has teamed up with her straight-talking hard-drinking cousin Mickie, resettled in Edinburgh from Australia, and Clair...

Crime novels are not usually all that complicated or nuanced. In many cases someone is killing people, a police detective is called in to investigate, solve the mystery and try to prevent more deaths; there are good guys and bad guys. Things are never so simple in M.R. Mackenzie's Anna Scavolini series of books, which is appropriate as she is a lecturer in criminology at University of Glasgow and it's a vast subject. And she is a lecturer, not a police detective or investigator. Yet crime affects everyone and has a wider impact on society, and that is something we continually find in Mackenzie's writing. That and the guarantee of a rattling good crime thriller, and he provides that again, page after page, in The Shadow Men . Mackenzie certainly doesn't take any easy route in the crimes he covers in his work. In Cruel Summer , the second Anna Scavolini book, he hinted at crimes of corruption and abuse that extend beyond the traditional underground gangland...

If you haven’t read M.R. Mackenzie s previous two Anna Scavolini crime thrillers ( In The Silence and Cruel Summer ) both are highly recommended. You won’t need to have read these books however to delve into The Library Murders as it’s a standalone thriller, but does help to see the unique place in Scottish crime fiction that Mackenzie is developing for himself and how this latest book adds another facet to his writing. It’s not just the Glasgow setting and locations, although those are quite colourfully depicted, as much as how Mackenzie continues to take a wider view on crime as a whole in his books. So far in his first two novels (and one free download short story The Girl Who Wasn’t ) M.R. Mackenzie has covered common gang related violence, the abuse of power by politicians and law enforcement authorities and the crimes enacted by men on women in the form of rape, domestic violence and psychological abuse. In many cases all these crimes are interrelated and Mackenzie covers them ...

It takes a little while before you know where it is going, but if you think no crime has taken place at the start of Cruel Summer , you haven’t been paying attention. And in some ways that’s the point of M.R. Mackenzie’s writing here; some crimes are more or less invisible to the general public. There’s no blood-soaked body lying in the snow of Kelvingrove Park, as there was in the author’s first novel In The Silence , but you can be sure that the focus on a Scottish MSP and his ambition to become the leader of the Scottish Conservative party disguises any number of sins against the community, with policies that have undoubtedly killed more than just one person. As it happens though Dominic Ryland has another uglier side to his personality, as Zoe Callahan discovers when she is out on a bender one night in Glasgow. Coming around in a guest house, she overhears two men talking about clearing up the rape of a woman in the room next to her, a woman who happens to be Zoe’s neighbour Jasmin...

As you might expect from any good murder-mystery thriller, there’s more than one problem to be solved and many deeper issues and potential layers of conflict that need to be unravelled to get to the bottom of what leads to murder in M R Mackenzie’s In The Silence . Glasgow probably isn’t any different from other cities in how it is burdened with class differences, religious tensions, gender inequalities and racial prejudices and preconceptions, but Mackenzie not only weaves all this into the potential motivation of the crime, he manages to bring them together in the personality and the experiences of his lead character, Anna Scavolini. Anna has been away from Glasgow for ten years, studying sociology and psychology at the Sapienza University in Rome, making a life and career for herself there as a lecturer and expert in feminist criminology. She’s been away long enough for all the conflicts and differences in her home city to strike her all the more forcefully when she accepts an invit...