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    Field of Blood
    Field of Blood
    Field of Blood
    Audiobook (abridged)7 hours

    Field of Blood

    Written by Denise Mina

    Narrated by Heather O'Neill

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When a sensational child murder sets fledgling journalist Paddy Meehan in search of the scoop that could make her career, what she finds could implicate her fiances family. As scandal looms, she finds she must connect this murder to an earlier crime in order to unravel the case.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 9, 2006
    ISBN9781598872453
    Field of Blood
    Author

    Denise Mina

    Denise Mina was born in East Kilbride in 1966. Her first book, Garnethill, won the CWA Dagger for Best First Crime Novel. She has won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year twice, and the MacIlvanney Prize twice. She is a presenter of TV and radio programmes, and appears regularly in the media. 

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    Reviews for Field of Blood

    3.5/5

    237 ratings16 reviews

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    • 2/5
      5633. Field of Blood A Novel by Denise Mina (read 19 Jun 2019) I asked the library tor the book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, by Joanne B. Freeman. The library told me the book was ready to pick up so I did and I was given this book by Denise Mina. I had never heard of her and would never have read the book but since I had it and had brought it home I decided to read it. I did, and at first I was a bit attracted to the story when the central character, Paddy Meehan, a young fat woman,who works for a Scottish newspaper in Glasgow and is engaged to Sean seeks to have sex with her fiance and he wisely says he prefers to wait till they are married. This is such a novelty in modern day fiction that I was impressed and admiratory of Sean. The story proceeds with a young child being brutally murdered by, apparently, two young boys. Paddy thinks the boys have been set to the evil deed by a man and investigates and finds the murder occurred exactly to the day eight years after another boy was murdered. She investigates and gives the name of another employee at the paper and that named employee is murdered. Things proceed and Paddy takes up smoking and loses her virginity--not, I was pleased,to Sean. She breaks up with Sean, to my regret, and all seems pretty unlikely and the book ends in an inconclusive way and I thought the story was jerkily told with little in it that impressed me. There is no danger I will read anything more by Mina. But I still want to read the book The Field of Blood, by Freeman, and I am confident I will find it a better book than this one was.
    • 3/5
      Excellent narration by Heather O'Neill. I like the newspaper theme with the protagonist being a copyboy (girl/person).
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It is a pleasure to find a new mystery, especially one set in Glasgow.
    • 4/5
      Excellent read. I really like Denise Mina's lapsed Catholic female protagonists. My favourite line was in the advice offered to Meehan by McVie:"Don't go on holiday to Blackpool, it's fucking horrible there." Couldn't agree more.
    • 3/5
      Paddy is an 18-year old working as a copyboy at the newspaper office with dreams of being a reporter. Although she considers herself fat, she has a fiancé named Sean whose family is close to hers. A 3-year old is murdered and two 10-year old boys are arrested for the crime -- one of them is Sean’s cousin. Paddy finds herself torn between her ambitions and the beliefs of her Catholic family and fiancé. The chasm gets wider when a confidence to a friend at the paper leads to a newspaper article on her fiancé’s family and everyone believes Paddy herself wrote it. For this imagined act of betrayal she is shunned by her family (while living in the same house) and Sean won’t return her calls. Her avoidance of her own home leads Paddy to investigate Baby Brian’s death and how it possibly connects to another murdered child from years earlier. She eventually teams up with a reporter at work, who becomes a romantic interest.

      Denise Mina is brilliant at creating characters and making you care about them. The passage at the front of the book was too disturbing to read and after a brief skim I passed it by. Also taking away a bit from the narrative flow was the interlacing backstory of Paddy's namesake Paddy Meehan, who apparently was convicted of murder in the 60's but continued to insist on his innocence. (What had this to do with the plot? Not a thing.) Although intelligent, Paddy makes rookie mistakes along the way and stumbles a bit awkwardly through the investigation, which is realistic for an amateur. I’m glad I have the rest of the books in this series already on my bookshelf. It will be interesting to see how Paddy develops both as a character and as a journalist. 3.5 stars
    • 4/5
      I literally had to put this book on hold for three weeks because I was 80% done and thought I could finish it in one night, and then realized the story was still going to continue and possibly end badly and didn't want to read it before going to bed because I'd have bad dreams. Today I finally had my first day off in three weeks so I was determined to finish it and while I am glad that I didn't try to read it at night, I am feeling somewhat let down at the ending. To avoid spoilers, I will just say that I feel like there was too much redemption for the main character.

      But how beautifully written and constructed. Fantastic characters. For the writing and storytelling alone I will try another book by this author.
    • 3/5
      Paddy Meehan is a young Catholic girl growing up in an Irish family in Glasgow in 1981. She has managed to land a fairly job on the Scottish Daily News where she dreams of becoming a reporter in her own right. As winter draws in the population Glasgow is shocked by the cruel murder of a young babywhose mutilated body is discovered abandoned and abused in a poor slum area. Worse still, it transpires that the baby had been tortured and then killed by young boys.While the murder seems to be an open-and-shut case, Paddy is convinced that there is more to the story than meets the eye. Delving through the newspaper's own clippings library she uncovers a similar crime from eight years ago, and starts to investigate further.As the story of the murdered boy unfolds we are given flashbacks to the story of another Paddy Meehan, this one male, who had been imprisoned, erroneously, for the brutal murder of the wife of an Ayrshire businessman. Mina weaves the two narrative together very deftly, and offers up a very convincing and engaging story. Glasgow itself is an ever-present character with its air of menace and religious bigotry.Very entertaining.
    • 4/5
      The first book about Paddy Meehan. Brilliant description of Glasgow early 1980's. Should be read in English otherwise you will miss out on the Glaswegian dialect.
    • 4/5
      Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, copygirl at Scottish Daily News, gets an unwelcome career boost when a toddler is murdered by two little boys, one of which is related to Paddy's fiancée. It's a very, very gruesome story - not only the part about the murder, which is horrific, but all the circumstances surrounding it. Mina writes well about 1980's Glasgow and manages to conjure up a feeling of that time and place, with its sometimes complicated family relations, living arrangements, and work situations, that rings absolutely true. This my first Denise Mina book and I've already been told that her other books are even better, so I'm looking forward to reading more.
    • 3/5
      The parallel story about the spy, Paddy Meehan, did not add too much to the story, albeit mildly interesting. Kids killing kids element seemed to be too much straight out of the news, and the twist although welcome was not overly plausible. The escape from Catholicism (loosing virginity), mildly interesting; the portrait of Catholic life a little more. Fat Catholic girl makes it in the newsroom , not too bad. Added up to a good story that will take me to the next installment, but that is about all.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book in Mina's series starring Paddy Meehan. Paddy is a great, if not always likable character, and her struggles to balance her ambitions as a reporter with her family's demands and Catholic morals are fascinating. The prose is dark and lush. The mystery itself is okay, although I guessed the murderer long before Paddy did. The scene that opens the novel is stomach-churning, and I would warn readers that it features not only a crime against a very small child, but a graphic description of the crime from the child's point of view. Overall, I liked it a lot and I will definitely be reading more in the series, because Paddy's such an interesting character and Mina's such a skillful author. Four stars.
    • 4/5
      A small boy, 3 years old, is killed in a very gruesome way and almost immediately two boys, age 10 and 11, are arrested for the murder. Paddy Meehan is 18 years old and a copyboy for the newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland. She wants to be a journalist, something that very few women were in 1981 in Glasgow, especially Irish Catholic women who lived in Glasgow. They were mostly wives and mothers. Paddy's family expects her to do the same. They expect her to marry her finacee, who is a good man, and then have kids and a family. But Paddy wants to be a journalist.The murder of the 3 year old little boy and then the subsequent arrest of the other two boys for the murder is shocking to the newsroom and all of Glasgow. Paddy knows that this is the story that could help make her if she could find something that would bring her to the attention of the editors. Then she discovers before anyone else that one of the arrested boys is her finacee's cousin. She knows she can't write the story or even give it to anyone because everyone she knows would disown her. Here is her chance and she can't use it. In an extraordinarily naive moment on her part she tells another woman at the paper and the woman betrays her trust and writes the story. Her family, her finacee, her whole community shun her; no one speaks to her or listens to her when she speaks to them for several days. Interwoven into the murder mystery involving the 3 year old boy is the story of another Paddy Meehan who was convicted for the murder of a woman he didn't kill and was also convicted of being a spy 12 years before Paddy begins trying to find a way to become a journalist. The earlier story involving the first Paddy Meehan has nothing to do with the murder of the child but is important in the telling to the story of our Paddy Meehan. I read the second book in this series first and already knew that the original Paddy Meehan still haunts our Paddy Meehan when the second book occurs. Some have been confused by the first Paddy's story taking up so much time in this book. And it is distracting, but the book is about Paddy not the murdered boy, so the whole story of the original Paddy is important.The origianl Paddy Meehan was a real person and was arrested and served time for a murder he did not committ. The murder of the 3 year old boy is also based on a real murder that occurred in 1993 in England (though our story occurs in 1981). There is also a riot that occurs in the book that did occur in Glasgow in the early 80's. The writer, Denise Mina uses these elements well in telling the story of Paddy as well as using Glasgow's struggle with the colapse of the industrial center in the city that occurred int he late 70's and early 80's. Weaving all these elements together is slow reading at times, this is definitely not a fast paced thriller but much more of a slow paced character study. When the tension does occur later in the book, the writer does it well until the very end where the only real action scene in the book is also the only weak scene in the whole book. It feels clumsy and not very believable. But Paddy is very believable. What you expect her to do at the end of the book is what she does. So do all the other people in her family and at work. This is a well written book about Paddy and her family and her city.
    • 3/5
      A bit of a slow starter, but I'm about 250 pages in and I'm finally beginning to get interested. Characters are complex and imperfect, which makes them interesting, but still feel a little bit flat. Now things are getting tense; I'm anxious to see where she goes from here.
    • 4/5
      18-year-old Paddy Meehan is a copyboy for the Scottish Daily News, but she dreams of becoming a journalist. When a baby is abducted and murdered, Paddy doesn't think the police are on the right track so she starts investigating on her own, not knowing what kind of danger she's in. I loved Mina's Garnet Hill trilogy so was excited to start with one of her Paddy Meehan mysteries. I wasn't as in love with the character at first, but now I'm eager to read the next book in the series. Mina always writes about strong, almost-fearless women who experience brutality during their investigations, but end up prevailing in the end. Some of the violence is more than I can stomach, but somehow Mina's stories pull me through it.
    • 4/5
      Poor, overweight Paddy, ambitious copy girl for the Glasgow Daily News, has ambitions of someday being a newspaper journalist. When two young boys are accused of violently murdering "wee baby Brian," Paddy is as horrified as anyone at the brutal crime. Suspecting an adult's involvement from the very beginning, Paddy resolves to find the real perpetrator after her family unfairly accuses her of writing an expose on one of the accused boys who just happens to be the cousin of her fiancee. In order to pursue her investigation and prove her innocence to her family, Paddy poses as one of the newspaper's real reporters, Heather Allen. When Heather turns up dead, Paddy begins to realize the danger that she is in.
    • 5/5
      Yay! Cheers for Paddy - can't wait to read her next book. Such a lovely, ungainly young woman, fraught with the insecurities (in *spades*!) that attend every girl who's trying to keep her identity while dealing with family and admirers who don't "get" her. Oh, Paddy, I'd love to have had you as a friend at that age, and now I'm old enough to be your mother I want to make you dinner!As far as I know, this is the first mystery I've read that's set in Scotland, and it was a winning introduction to the dialect and setting. Also, I remember 1981 well - having graduated from high school that year - so the references to the fashions, etc. are poignant for me. (Wonder why DM chose that time, though? Perhaps she's planning for Paddy to catch up to modern days over the course of the series. Kind of clever planning, actually.)Details peculiar to the setting and era - the pub-dwellers, journalists, male-female relations, Protestant-Catholic conflict, women's roles, class issues - they were all fascinating to me without taking over the story. As usual it made me want to travel and see it all for myself.The only thing that left me feeling a little unsatisfied was the connection between the first and second Paddys. The attempt to draw the connection between the two confused me (which I readily admit could be reader incompetence on my part) and seemed a little strained - you know, forcing square pegs into round holes. I'll go out on a limb and guess what DM was aiming for and perhaps someone could email me if I got it wrong: Paddy 2's guilt over falsely accusing someone (who in the end is guilty anyway) forces both a confrontation and an epiphany about her role as a reporter...while Paddy 1's experience of being falsely accused renders him just another body taking up space in a pub - though it does provide a connection that explains Paddy 2's shoddy treatment by the local cops. Is that plot device, though, enough to warrant such a lengthy examination? I give up, I'm clueless on this.