Margot's mother has died and she's left her partner because, having become pregnant, she's not sure he's someone to raise a child with. In the middle of that upheaval, she meets her birth mother's sister. Her birth family is very different from Margot. She's a GP with a quiet middle-class life and her aunt and mother were both drug-addicted prostitutes with unstable childhoods and while her aunt is now clean, she's still part of Glasgow's underclass. Margot wanted to find out about her mother's health history but what she gets instead is a plea to help bring her mother's murderer to justice. Margot is torn between a fascination with her mother's life and murder and a wariness about her rediscovered family. And her best friend is having trouble leaving her abusive husband, she's getting threatening letters slipped under her door and someone may be following her.

Denise Mina writes with heart and compassion about Glasgow's underclass, and in this novel that skill is well-deployed. Here, the bad guys are both very bad and very human, the protagonist is flawed, yet brave and the many characters, from Margot herself to those we encounter for only a sentence or two are complex and real. There's a terrifying scene with a drunk mugger in which the mugger is both menacing and pitiful. This is Mina at her best, a well-plotted noir set in the back streets and hidden closes of Glasgow.

The Less Dead was a split for me between very entertaining and captivating mystery storylines, and random storylines that never really seemed to go anywhere. On the one hand, I was definitely interested in finding out who murdered Margo's mom and found the central characters to be well-developed. However, I was also expecting more to come of other storylines that in the end I think were just placed there for distraction. This is a quick mystery read, perfect to finish over a weekend.

The Less Dead was one of my most anticipated titles of the summer (I'm a Denise Mina fan from way back and I loved Conviction.) This ended up being a bit of a mixed bag for me.

I loved the book's premise: Margo, whose adoptive mother has just died, meets her biological aunt, who tells her that her bio mom was murdered. The aunt is a little nutty and admits that she and Margo's mom were drug addicted prostitutes back in the day. And that psychic powers run in the family (Margo is sure this is just mental illness.) So Margo is skeptical, and a little worried about her own medical history (this is the reason she tracked down her relatives in the first place.

But then she starts looking into the case and ... maybe her aunt is right.

Like Conviction, this has a black comedy vibe that may not work for every reader. The book deals with tough topics, from heroin addiction to mental illness to serial murder and stalking, but definitely has a vibe that I'd call ... wacky?

It also has a lot going on, from the fact that Margo is newly pregnant and hiding that from the baby's father, that her best friend is being stalked by a crazy ex-boyfriend, who is also the uncle-to-be of Margo's unborn child.

I loved the opening chapters. Then my interest lagged a bit in the middle when I wondered if the plot was just too convoluted for me and the darkly comic tone just a little too at odds with the subject matter. But I did stick it out to the end, and I did like the ending.

Review: A story filled with suspense and mystery , The synopsis was very intriguing and I was very excited to get lost in this story . With that said, it was pretty weird . There were so many thing added in that didn’t add to the story, , they were unnecessary, more of a distraction . I’m not sure how Margos friends lilahs story fit into everything , and the whole aftermath of that situation is so weird . The characters were not likable at all, especially Margo, she was quite frustrating . The ending was a Major let down, I’m still trying to figure out what happen.

Summary. Margos reeling from the lost of her mom and news of her pregnancy . She set out to find her birth family and came in contact with her Aunt Nikki. The reunion is not what she expect because she finds out that her birth mom was murdered and the killer has been hunting her aunt. Dealing with her own issues and not willing to get caught up in this madness, Margo tries to distance her self, but when she starts getting threatening letters her life is now in danger and she has to find The killer before it’s too late.

I really hate giving negative reviews for an ARC, but, I need to be completely honest. I really disliked the way this one read. A majority of it was written in third person present tense, and I felt like I was reading a children’s book. An example: “Margo thinks she’s bad to Joe. Joe thinks she’s bad to Joe”. Also, Margo’s character was so inconsistent and all over the place. She was so hot and cold and was actually a really bad person. Nothing in this story went anywhere. There were several plot lines and none had a conclusion. The less dead are the sex workers who are murdered, and because they are sex workers, are deemed as less important, therefore their deaths don’t warrant a thorough investigation. I completely understand the message this book was trying to convey and the extreme importance of it, but the writing and the execution completely took me out of it.

I really enjoyed this book! This book grabbed my attention from the start, and I couldn't wait to finish it! I will definitely look out for other selections from this author.

I was extremely excited for this book after reading Conviction. Unfortunately, while still a good story that advocates for an extremely important issue, The Less Dead did not have the thrilling magic that Conviction did.

Margo is the protagonist of this story, a GP in Scotland who discovers she’s pregnant and seeks out information on her birth mother to learn more about her family’s medical history. She meets her Aunt Nikki who is a former drug addict and learns not only that her mother was an addict as well, but that her mother was a brutally murdered sex worker. Nikki pleads for Margo’s help to find the serial killer who murdered her mother and others and continues to send Nikki threatening letters decades letter. Margo refuses to believe Nikki and tries to forget everything about her and her mother…until she starts receiving threatening letters herself.

The story revolves around Margo’s issues with her ex-boyfriend and father of her child, mourning the loss of her birth and adoptive mothers, a toxic friendship with her best friend, a toxic boyfriend of said toxic best friend, a distant relationship with her adoptive brother, a weirdly friendly social worker and so much more. There were too many plot lines that were introduced that were not properly resolved. The ending felt rushed and incomplete. There was no resolution to the vast majority of plot lines and characters introduced.

Despite the issues in the story, the biggest impediment in me liking The Less Dead was Margo herself. Bottom line, Margo is a terrible person. Despite being a doctor and taking care of people for a living, she does not care about anyone else but herself and has zero empathy. She is continuously judging everyone around her and saying the most awful things. She basically talks about and to her aunt like she is trash. She openly admits she does it and does not ever really apologize for it. She has full self-awareness about her bad of a person she is and does not ever change it. While sometimes having an unlikable narrator works, Margo's character has no arc and begins and ends the novel with being a bad person. That for me personally, made me not enjoy the book as much as I would have otherwise.

I wanted to LOVE this book and fully expected I would. Even though I did not, I still really did enjoy sex trafficking being the central theme. As someone who worked for a nonprofit dedicated to helping victims of prostitution and sex trafficking, I appreciate and admire Mina's efforts to get readers to empathize with and humanize sex workers, whom society treats like garbage. For that reason, this gets a three star rating from me.

Thank you to NetGalley, Mulholland Books and Denise Mina for this advanced copy in exchange for my unbiased review! I look forward to reading future books from Mulholland Books and Denise Mina.

I'm a sucker for an adoption story especially when it is a mystery. I liked that there were a lot of female characters and minimal police involvement but somehow the story fell flat. A lot of time was spent on describing locations that were not ultimately important and too little fleshing out of the people. An odd choice in a book like this. As a result I felt like I was really working hard to keep going.

The Less Dead is my first Denise Mina book. I've heard wonderful things about her previous book, Conviction, and I may still make time to read it, although I didn't really enjoy this one. It's certainly an interesting premise, and there was just enough uncertainty to keep me reading. In between the compelling events, the rest is just dry. Descriptions of neighborhoods, clothes, houses, pubs, any mundane thing... I've never been to Scotland, but I certainly feel I know this area well. And maybe my real issue with the book is the unsympathetic character of Margo. She's a doctor, therefore she believes herself superior to almost everyone she encounters in the book, but then she turns around and does the most reckless and ignorant things possible! My feelings about The Less Dead are complicated. I loved the insight into the underworld of sex work, the tough women who survived drug addiction, and the central mystery. I just didn't care for the MC and the incessant filler of details. Maybe I'm just not cerebral enough to understand what the author was trying to convey. I know that others will enjoy it, but The Less Dead was just okay for me.
3 stars

I was provided a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Thank you to Mulholland Books and Netgalley.

I loved Denise Mina's book last year and this one didn't disappoint me. Her characters were complex and interesting. Her books are just different but in such a good way.
This wasn't just a procedural type book it was also a mystery which I loved. I loved the plot behind all this that Margot's life is in transition clearing out her mother's house who recently passed.
Another hit from Mina but I'm not surprised.

Thanks to Netgalley for my advanced ebook copy.

The Less Dead by Denis Mina was complex and a different mystery. It was not a procedural and was not focused solely on the mystery but on The victims and was a refreshing change. The title itself refers to the victims in this book who are prostitutes but are referred to as “the less dead” by the police as they were considered Not really human to begin with.
Margot. A doctor, whose adoptive mother has just passed away discovers some correspondence from her birth family and ends up meeting her aunt Nikki. Her biological aunt Nikki is not quite what she is expecting as she is an addict and a prostitute , Nikki tells Margot they her birth mother was murdered years ago and her case is unsolved as are several other prostitute murders of the same time. Margot then Becomes the amateur detective of the story and is on a hunt to learn more about her birth mother . Or course she is threatened and stalked along the way and she naturally makes some terrible decisions like all amateur detectives do. However Denise Mina makes it work as the decisions are definitely part of Margots Personality and state of mind as she is going through a lot . She is in over her head in more than trying to find out about her mother . The subplots all tie in well to the story as well. I was satisfied with the reveal of the “bad guy” as it was not blatantly obvious and I’m glad that it was resolved and we were not left hanging. I could’ve used more of an ending however,. Overall a great fast paced read . Recommend!

You can count on Denise Mina to surprise you. This time, the surprise is that I really didn't like her protagonist. Usually I love these damaged, mouthy, wonderful women, but Margo Dunlop is just ... fairly ordinary. Her dramas are domestic: she's just learned she's pregnant, she's left the nice bloke she was living with because she's not sure he's parental material, and her best friend has terrible taste in men. Her adoptive mother has recently died and she has to clear out a house full of stuff, but can't quite bring herself to get it done. Relatable? Maybe, but not likeable in the way Mina's outspoken, bristly, leap-off-the-page heroines usually are.

You know that trope in which an ordinary woman is thrust into an extraordinary situation, is being stalked by someone evil, and the suspense is killing you? Well in this case, Margo is feeling completely out of her depth, but not so much because she's learned her birth mother was murdered, or that someone is sending her nasty, horrible letters, but because she's just met her aunt and been introduced to the world she and her mother lived in - a world of being marginalized and shamed while just trying to survive poverty and neglect as sex workers. (Less dead when murdered than other "normal" people, hence the title.) These are the women who come to life, whose anger and realism make this story work.

At first I was a bit disappointed, thinking this was a relatively standard story, complete with short chapters from the "mind of the killer" with a heroine I didn't much like, but as the women who steal the show spoke up I began to see what she was actually up to. It reminded me of Stieg Larsson's original title for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Men Who Hate Women, and in a similar way it's the women - not Margo, but the women she meets - who take all the tired crime fiction tropes, turn them inside out, and have the last word.