After 15 novels, a similar number of comic book stories and four plays, Denise Mina is already quite sure she has chosen the right profession.

The way the 55-year-old Scottish writer has come this far has been quite winding.

Mina, whose work as an engineer's father brought her family to move frequently from country to country, managed to live in her youth in 21 different places (including Paris, The Hague, Bergen and London).

She left school at the age of 16 and for a few years worked for a living as a bartender, caring for the elderly and terminally ill and working in a meat processing plant.

She returned to school, completed a law degree and thought she had found her place in academia, but in the middle of her doctoral dissertation she also wrote a novel, which became a trilogy ("Granethil Trilogy"), after which she wrote more and more.

"Death on the Dana" (English: Ilan Penn, Penn Publishing / Yedioth Books) is Mina's first novel translated into Hebrew.

At its center, as in most of her library, is a woman whose complex living story is exposed in parallel to a crime mystery.

Anna McDonald hides behind a peaceful life in a relaxed and elegant suburb of Glasgow, with a husband who is a lawyer, two daughters, a nice house and nice tools.

But that envelope cracks at once when her husband informs her that he is leaving her for the sake of her best friend, Estelle, and at the same time she is sucked into a crime affair she hears about in one of the podcasts dedicated to real crime, which she loves to listen to so much.

The podcast, called "Death on the Dana," tells the story of a father and his two children who were killed in a yacht explosion in the middle of the sea.

Anna knew the man, and the possibility that he himself was responsible for the explosion did not seem plausible to her.

This story is taken from her previous life, then, when she was still called Sophie, before she adopted a different identity and ran for her life - and yet, she sets out to find out the truth.

Mina builds an excellent suspense plot.

Her protagonist has a big mouth and a full past, and when she breaks free from the suburban life where the Pilates class is the exciting event of the week, she herself becomes an interesting and stronger woman.

But it was not boredom that drew Anna / Sophie back to the danger zone, but the injustice done to her years ago, the persecution and threats on her life she experienced following the incident and the renewed opportunity to stand on her own.

"The book was written four years ago and already has outdated parts," says Mina.

"Face recognition technology is already prevalent today, which if it were then, Anna would not be able to hide at all."

Such things bother her and permeate her writing, and Mina takes advantage of the momentum of events to talk about sexual violence, silence, the power of the wealthy and the layers of lies and manipulations that capital-government ties allow.

Shout through the writing

As a lawyer, you have the ability to address all of these social issues in the courts.

What drew you to writing thrillers?

'Reading, of course.

I did not decide to become a writer, it was an impulse I could not conquer.

While writing my doctorate I thought I could discuss ideas related to law and justice in a much more effective way through the literature, getting people to read inside a story about topics that are not always comfortable for them to think about.

"I read a lot of American thrillers, and always at the end the police would find the criminal and shoot him in the street. It seemed so authoritative to me, so pro-police. I talked about it non-stop for the last 20 years in all the interviews, but it was never included. "In the articles about me, they thought I was crazy. It was only after the murder of George Floyd, when the Black Lives Matter movement was formed, that people here began to understand what I wanted."

Is your writing feminist?

'Very, but not just mine.

There are writers like Val McDermid or Sarah Peretzky - we do the same thing at the same time, making the genre feminine in the sense that it suddenly has talk of not always bothering to file indictments against sexual assailants, that whoever has enough money can silence complaints against him, that families do not Believe in victims of sexual exploitation because it is difficult to accept that such a thing happens at home. '

Shouldn't thrillers be entertaining?

"Not only.

All of these complex issues can be put into a good suspense story so that people will read and it will interest them and when they close the book something in them will still change because they were exposed to a narrative they did not know.

If I shouted at a demonstration no one would want to listen to me, but if I wrap it in a suspense story - people read. '

"Attracted to what is confusing and scary"

Mina tends to skip between genres.

She has written historical novels, 13 stories in the American horror comic book series "Hellblazer", adapted the Stig Larsson "Millennium Trilogy" for the comics, and is currently adapting Brecht's "Mr. Pontilla and Matty his Servant" for a British-Turkish co-production.

"If your first book is a thriller, that's the label you get," she says.

Can you guess that of all these things, writing a comic was the most fun?

'Comics are a wonderful thing, but it's a very hard job.

You have to write meticulously and accurately, adapt yourself to the style of the person drawing, there are no descriptions of atmosphere or descriptions at all ... It is an exercise that every writer owes to himself, it is like writing haiku after years of writing poems. '

You were born into a very religious Catholic family.

Is any of this left in you?

"is nothing.

I'm very non-religious, and I learned to walk carefully and tell people who talk to me about their belief that 'I was not blessed with faith'.

I understand that it helps people deal with the fact that the world is confusing and scary.

I'm actually drawn to everything that is confusing and scary, it's intriguing and gives me topics to write about. '

Your stories have train journeys, wanderings, almost like the ones that characterized your childhood.

'Yes, it was a great privilege.

My father worked for an oil company.

Most of the families were left behind and the men would travel alone and send money home.

I think my mom did not trust my dad so she insisted we go with him but I did not feel disconnected because we had a large family left here in Scotland and always had nowhere to go back.

"Scotland is very culturally uniform, cold and rainy here all year round, so the fact that I lived in foreign languages, met all kinds of cultures and was an outsider in so many places greatly expanded my world. It's an unparalleled intellectual stimulus."

Glasgow, where you live, has a tradition of storytelling.

'What's happening here in Russia too - when no one has money, people can not compete and show off how much money they have.

Instead, they compete for the ability to entertain, to tell a good story. '

I know what I prefer.

"Yes, me too, but it's probably because as writers, we do not have a big house and new cars ..."