Original, quirky thriller with my favorite type of smart-mouthed, snarky heroine. Perhaps a few too many luxury brand references but I do want a pair of her Margaret Howell trousers.

Denise Mina is back with a vengeance with Conviction. It's a great read with cutting edge premise and an intriguing plot line.

A woman living a "perfect" life under an assumed name is compulsively listening to a true-crime podcast when her perfect life is shattered. Her best friend and her wealthy, boring husband are having an affair and want her to move out. She doesn't take it well. That's not who she is.

When a photo of her best friend's anorexic and famous husband goes viral online, it happens to have her face in it. And that's very bad news, because a very powerful woman wants her dead. In fact, she had her killed, or thought she had. Now Anna/Sophie is on the run with a man with a large social media following who has started podcasting a follow-up to the true crime podcast Anna had been obsessed with, the one about a boat blowing up with a man she'd known and his two children aboard. The two of them set out to solve the mystery while hiding while podcasting what they figure out.

Denise Mina has a way of creating prickly characters who you love even if they have a habit of hitting people with trays or sugar bowls. She gets human beings and she gets how human beings act online. She's just a brilliant writer, and this book is extraordinarily entertaining. There probably is a lot about identity and social media and how we represent ourselves that could be pondered here, but there's not much time for pondering when you're having so much fun.

What a bizarre whirlwind of a book. I loved it. The voice is what I would call frenetic--it felt like a frenetic reading experience. I devoured it in two marathon, late night reading sessions, drawn in by MC Anna's darkly comedic tone, and the pull of the mystery. I adore a good "the ridiculous rich" thriller, which is what this plays on: on the day her marriage falls apart, Anna starts listening to a new true crime podcast about a yacht sunk off the coast of France and the rich family who drown inside. Anna realizes she knew one of the deceased, and is convinced the podcast is wrong, that he didn't kill himself and his family. She sets off to prove it wrong, but ends up tangled up with powerful individuals who have crossed her before.

Now this sounds like all the tropes we've seen plenty of times in adult thrillers, but it really is the POV and tone that makes the book: Anna is guarded, borderline unlikeable (she says, but of course I liked her), but darkly funny, and her investigation/travel partner is a washed up, anorexic rock star who tweets about their findings and goes viral. There is literally a scene where Anna and Fin (the rockstar) get drunk off their asses on vodka on a train with two assassins. It was bizarre, and delightful. There was lots of guessing as the layers of the mystery unfolded--what happened on the boat, what happened to Anna, who the real bad guy is--but it wasn't a thriller where all the delight derived from the guessing and the twists. Indeed, the twists become increasingly soap opera-esque, and the book embraces the grandiose tone, which is one of the reasons I loved it. The last third is pretty bonkers and it is delightful.

Two nitpicks: do podcasts work differently in the UK? Because in my experience as a listener and recorder of podcasts, no one is doing them on their phone and uploading them in real time to Twitter? That's not a podcast? That's an audio tweet. Podcasts are all researched and recorded ahead of time, and then the story is edited and it is cut together and released--that is how true crime podcasts work. They are journalism, not off-the-cuff audio tweets? And even non-true crime podcasts are not recorded/released like that. I was confused every time they called was Fin was doing a podcast. Podcasts need servers/hosts and RSS feeds to be pulled into podcast apps, etc. (would have worked better as YouTube videos actually)

And at one point there is a character in France speaking broken English and then at the end of the conversation it turns out he is German and I had to laugh. The transliteration of his broken English was clearly FRENCH not German. It bugged me a little. (The way a German person will transliterate for English is different than French, and the entire dialogue scene had a French rhythm)

One quibble: Don't love the US cover. I gave this a chance on NetGalley because I really loved the last book from this imprint that I read (The Stranger Inside), but I almost didn't because of the cover. It's very upmarket adult fiction (with colors and symbols that throw Asian diaspora, which it is not even in the slightest!), clearly trying to appeal to a different demographic than I am, which is a shame. I think general market adult thriller readers may love this too, but it doesn't have a cover that speaks to that genre. The UK cover fit the genre better, IMO, though I think in both instances a quirkier title would have been better.

Also I really hope someone options this because it would make a fun movie. I could see Working Title making it.

I have always heard great things about Denise Mina, and never read her, until now, and now I’m an instant fan. The book is highly engrossing and entertaining, and a great yarn, with enough twists to keep one guessing until the end. Really enjoyable, and I’m thrilled to chat it up.