Conviction: A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick

Product Information

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. A mischievous sense of fun exists alongside a capacity to generate genuine edge-of-your-seat thrills and some thought-provoking moments. You won’t have more fun with a book this year Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

Nancie Clare: Faith, specifically Catholicism, which hangs on many of your characters like a crucifix—as well as the absence of faith—figure strongly in Confidence. Catholicism seems to one of the prisms through which the characters see and react to the events of Confidence.Anna McDonald is a married woman who believes she is happily married when her husband takes off with her best friend and her children. With her life left in tatters, she starts investigating a man whose family is featured on a podcast. All were murdered at sea, on the Dana, a sunken yacht in the Bay of Biscay. The podcast accuses many and that crime is shrouded in secrecy and mayhem. The Dana had a history. Cursed they said. In Three Fires, award-winning author Denise Mina re-imagines the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the fifteenth century - inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola. Anna decided at that point to confront Gretchen. She and Fin traveled to Paris and arranged a meeting. Inside Gretchen’s home, Anna correctly accused Gretchen of planning the murders of Leon and his family when she learned that Leon was broke. Anna had also deducted that Violetta had survived the sinking of the Dana and had taken the identity of Gretchen’s personal secretary, Dauphine. Anna accused Violetta of having murdered her mother, and of having plans to murder Gretchen so that she could inherit her fortune. At this point, Gretchen called forward an assassin to kill Anna. 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.

Anna is your typical housewife who enjoys listening to podcasts/escaping into a book along with a nice cup of Joe after getting the kids up and ready each day. Unfortunately for Anna, this particular day happens to be the one where . . . . . 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. Such a busy involved plot. I found the story within a story, the podcast more interesting. Indeed this is the mystery she becomes preoccupied with that gives her some drive to do more than just try to re-invent herself again.

Beyond the Book

Absolutely highly recommended. Also before you think I’m cleverer than I am, the Latin came from an episode of the also brilliantly written “The West Wing” and has stayed with me long enough for me to apply it here. But Anna and Finn are looking for her because they kind of know who she is. [Anna, Finn and the missing girl] are part of that small community of makers creating stories in new ways and putting them on the internet, not necessarily making a living but finding their way through new media. The story is quite fractured; almost all crime stories have two stories that run parallel to each other. What I was trying to do is take those stories apart and make them more distinct. And I think that’s why people are reading it as a meta story. 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 Glasgow’s West End: ‘I’m not from here. I live here and I observe here, but I don’t feel Glaswegian.’ Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

This is a murder she can’t ignore, and she throws herself into investigating the case. But little does she know, her past and present lives are about to collide, sending everything she has worked so hard to achieve into freefall.I wanted Anna and Fin to meet up with my Brunetti. That didn't happen-but some Venice locale situations fit right in to his world and tone- regardless. Especially tourist comments by the cafe locals. Killers from Russia and Eastern Europe- assassins by proxy. All aboard! This highly original, ballsy thriller is like nothing you have read – or Denise Mina has written – before Mark Sanderson, The Times, *Books of the Year*