Abir Mukherjee

The first is a book called The Long Drop.

by Denise Mina, who your listeners may have heard of.

Denise is a wonderful British author.

I think she's probably the finest crime fiction author in the UK today.

I think her work is just amazing.

The Long Drop was her book just before the current one, which is called Conviction.

But The Long Drop is a fictionalised account of 24 hours in the life of a real serial killer from Glasgow called Peter Manuel.

It's bizarre in that this could only happen in Glasgow.

The serial killer actually went on a bender with the husband and father of two of his victims.

Actually, it could happen in Glasgow.

It could probably happen in Australia as well, but not many other places.

And nobody quite knows what took place on that night when these two men went on this drunken bender.

And so this is a wonderful, wonderful book, a fictionalised account of what might have gone on.

So that to me was very interesting.

Absolutely.

I mean, one of my heroes is Ian Rankin.

I've read everything, everything that Ian Rankin's produced.

Val McDermid, too, is just, you know, an absolute wonder.

And both of them are in the tradition.

I think, you know, what we call Tarte Noire is, to me, using the crime novel as a vehicle for social commentary.