The End of the Wasp Season - Tapa dura

One of Denise Mina's many attractions is her willingness to take risks with her characters. She delves deeper than most into emotions, whether of the police, victims or perpetrators; she eschews the usual formula of crime fiction....The financial and moral disintregration of families, the iniquities of the class system and prostitution all play a role. Mina's best (Marcel Berlins THE TIMES)

A literary West Lothian question: why do Scottish writers dominate British crime fiction? With Denise Mina at least, the answer is pure class (Jake Kerridge DAILY TELEGRAPH)

Perceptive and insightful at both ends of the social scale, Mina eschews cliffhangers and plot twists - here, pathos provides the fuel for real suspense. Marvellous (Laura Wilson THE GUARDIAN)

...Thoughful attention to detail take the novel to another level...Scotland has produced some seriously good crime writers; The End of the Wasp Season places Denise Mina alongside Ian Rankin and Val McDermid (Christopher Fowler FINANCIAL TIMES)

This wonderfully plotted combination of police procedural, psychological thriller and social comment leap-frogs Denise Mina to the top rank of Scotland's crime-writing scene (Myles McWeeney IRISH INDEPENDENT)

She has immeasurably widened the scope of Scottish crime fiction, dragging its cliches out of the dark alleys and beating them to death in broad daylight (David Robinson THE SCOTSMAN)

Miss your bus stop....reading The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina, a gripping tale tracing the links between an elite private school, the suicide of a millionaire banker and the shocking murder of a wealthy young woman (GRAZIA)

A wealthy single woman wakes up in her mother's house to the sound of intruders creeping up the stairs. From this gripping start, Mina seizes our attention, and holds it until the final shocking twist in the tale (PSYCHOLOGIES)

both a police procedural and a psychological thriller. Deftly plotted and, as with Mina's other work, always anchored by a strong seam of compassion for those characters at the sharp end of the class divide; who in this novel have the extra burdens of recession and cuts to social services to bear...A rewarding read which explores the significance of love in childhood and the dreadful damage wrought by its absence (Cath Staincliffe TANGLED WEB)

It dispels with the whodunnit format, instead revealing everything at the start, and brilliantly spends the novel delving into the motivations and problems of a wide range of diverse characters (Doug Johnstone THE BIG ISSUE)