Not a single word is wasted in this beautifully written novel. Unsettling, evocative and staggeringly good, it is possibly Mina's finest achievement" * Daily Express * Conviction stars a strong female protagonist who is obsessed by true crime podcasts and decides, one day, to investigate one of the unsolved crimes herself. The idea of introducing most of the initial plot through a podcast was such a great way to hook the reader in, all the information is told in manageable bitesize chunks as Anna listens to each episode. Considering Denise is on the cusp of the publication of her seventeenth novel—not to mention graphic novels, plays, short stories, film, TV and radio programs—that’s a lot of sidewalk conversations over her twenty-five-year-long career as a writer. Not a single word is wasted in this beautifully written novel. Unsettling, evocative and staggeringly good, it is possibly Mina’s finest achievement Daily Express

Obviously this was 100% farfetched and people who only enjoy realistic tales will find plenty to complain about here. Buuuuuuuuut, if you just enjoy escaping into your stories and love a good game of . . . . This was not always the case. When Mina was starting out in the late 90s, the crime readership could be said to be acclimatising to female protagonists – such as Val McDermid’s journalist sleuth Lindsay Gordon, first published by the Women’s Press in 1987, Frances Fyfield’s London lawyer Sarah Fortune, or US colossus Sue Grafton’s private investigator Kinsey Millhone. A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle (2007), inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's modernist poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and first performed by Karen Dunbar.Denise Mina: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing about the videos are, they are so engaging and it is such a lovely thing to describe a video to somebody to try and make it come alive. It’s a writing challenge! But when I pitched Conviction in 2017—it was published in 2019— podcasts were not a big thing; they were not very familiar. And a lot of people said to me, um, “how can you be sure that podcasts will still exist in five years’ time?” And that’s not long ago! Nancie, you never said that because we were both very into podcasts already, but quite a few of the interviews—one of them was a guy who reviewed podcasts for a living!—did. Actually [ Conviction ] was met with a bit of bafflement because it was like, “what are podcasts?” And then the next year four different crime novels came out about people doing podcasts. The rate of change is so fast, it’s lovely to represent something early. Everyone will be talking more about representations of multiplatform storytelling forums and how they feed into each other. And actually, that is amazing. We never talk about the positives of social media. What is amazing about social media is your brain can take that. You can watch Stranger Things and live tweet about Stranger Things . And it’s really enjoyable. The Long Drop is a fascinating, quietly insidious work, unsettling but absorbing" -- Marcel Berlins * The Times * Denise Mina gets to the heart of what crime really is. You feel like you are right there, in all the dark nooks and crannies that her characters inhabit

This is such a good novel with a mystery and thriller rolled together, two stories into one with Anna the key. It has issues that are real and current that the reader can identify with, while having that dimension of escapism that makes for a great summer read. Glasgow itself is an imposing element in her writing – the rhythm of the speech, the cadences of the humour, the sometimes restrictive feeling of a small city where family and strangers can become overfamiliar. If a reader were arriving fresh to Mina’s work, one of their early hits really ought to be her last book, The Long Drop, the semi-fictionalised account of the serial killer Peter Manuel and an evocative portrait of Glasgow in the 50s. Conviction is a wholly different type of novel in the suspense genre. My favorite parts of this book are the interactions between the characters (Anna, Fin and another character named Adam) v. the chapters featuring the actual podcasts (which I think are on the slower side). What I find intriguing is how the author, Denise Mina, intertwines the storylines – which at first, seem quite impossible and then, well, are absolutely seamless.The use of social media is also very cleverly interwoven into Anna’s exposure but also as a means to find out what happened on the Dana - the subject of the podcast Anna initially listens to at home.