All of Denise Mina's crime novels.
The Second Murderer
It's mid-September, a heatwave has descended on the parched hills of LA and Private Detective Philip Marlowe is called to the Montgomery estate, an almost mythic place sitting high on top of Beverly Hills. Wealthy twenty-two-year-old Chrissie Montgomery, set to inherit an enormous fortune, is missing.
She's a walking target, ripe for someone to get their claws into. Her dying father, along with his sultry bottle blonde girlfriend, wants her found before that happens. They've hired Anna Riorden, Marlowe's nemesis, too. The search takes them to the roughest neighbourhoods of LA through dive bars and Skid Row. And that's before he finds the body at The Brody Hotel. Who will get to her first, Marlowe, Anne, or the men chasing her fortune? And does she want to be found?
Three Fires
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.
Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar living in Florence at the tail end of the fifteenth century. An anti-corruption campaigner his hellfire preaching increasingly spilled over into tirades against all luxuries that tempted people towards sin. These sermons led to the infamous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ - a series of fires lit throughout Florence for the incineration of everything from books, extravagant clothing, playing cards, musical instruments, make-up and mirrors, to paintings, tapestries and sculptures.
Railing against the vice and avarice of the ruling Medici family, he was instrumental in their removal from power, and for a time became the puritanical leader of the city. After turning his attention to corruption in the entire Catholic Church, he was first excommunicated and then executed by a combination of hanging and being burnt at the stake.
Denise Mina brings a modern take to this fascinating historical story - drawing parallels between the febrile atmosphere of medieval Florence and the culture wars of the present day. In dramatising the life and last days of Savonarola she explores the downfall of the original architect of cancel culture and in the process explores the never-ending tensions between wealth, inequality, and freedom of speech that so dominate our modern world.
Confidence
DECEPTION. THEFT. MURDER.
ALL YOU NEED IS CONFIDENCE.
When amateur film-maker Lisa Lee vanishes from a Scottish seaside town, journalists Anna and Fin find themselves at the centre of an internet frenzy to find her.
But she may not be the hapless victim everyone thinks she is. The last film she made showed her breaking into an abandoned French chateau and stumbling across a priceless Roman silver casket. The day after Lisa vanishes the casket is listed for auction in Paris, reserve price fifty million euros, with a catalogue entry that challenges the beliefs of a major world religion.
On a thrilling chase across Europe to discover what happened to Lisa, Anna and Fin are caught up in a world of international art smuggling, billionaire con artists and religious zealotry.
But someone doesn't want them to find the missing girl... and will do anything to stop them.
Rizzio
Early in the evening of Saturday the 9th of March 1566 Mary Queen of Scots was six months pregnant and hosting a supper party for her close friends. Spring was threatening in Ediburgh and she was about to host a meeting of the Scots Parliament that would change history and cement her power as Queen just as she entered the dangerous time of her confinement.
She didn’t know that the nobles of Scotland were massing in the chamber below her that night, that the Palace of Holyrood was surrounded by armed men and the Palace Guard overthrown. She didn’t suspect anything until her husband, Lord Darnley, walked into the supper room and sat down next to her, slipping his arm around her waist.
Then she knew something terrible was going to happen. Everyone knew.
What followed was a murder so brutal that it slipped the eye of popular history for two hundred years.
History is often most telling in the unspoken spaces.
The Less Dead
Margo Dunlop is waiting in a hot, unfamiliar room. She’s waiting to meet her birth family, they asked her to come here, but they’re nearly two hours late. When they finally meet she finds that her birth mother is long dead, another forgotten victim of the heroin epidemic in the late 1980s and one of a string of street women murdered back in the day. It’s a sad old story from a long time ago.
But then Margo gets a letter from the killer. It’s hand delivered to her door in the middle of the night. They know where she lives, what she looks like. They know that she is a doctor and her adoptive mother just died and they want her to know that her time is coming.
Relying on her best friend, semi-professional feckless beauty Lilah, Margo has to dig into the story that was told about her mother at the time, question how it was told and fight for her mum so that justice can be done.
Conviction
It’s a normal week day morning for Anna McDonald, packing lunches, gym kits, getting everyone up and ready, until she opens the front door. Her best friend, Estelle, is standing on the front step wearing a new dress and holding a suitcase. Anna turns to see own her husband at the top of the stairs. He has a suitcase too. They’re leaving together and they’re taking Anna’s two daughters with them.
Left alone in the big dark house, she can’t deal, she can’t think, she can’t take it in. Her safe, predictable world is shattered and Anna does what she always does: distracts herself with a story. A true crime podcast this time. It’s a compelling one. There’s a sunken yacht in the Mediterranean, multiple murders and a hint of power and corruption. Then Anna realizes that she knew one of the victims a long time ago, in another life. Her past, so carefully hidden until now, will no longer stay silent. But she’s convinced she knows what happened. This is a murder mystery that she can’t ignore.
Anna becomes a citizen detective, obsessively investigating the case. Little does she know that her past and present lives are about to collide, and send everything she has worked so hard to achieve into freefall.
Conviction was a New York Times Bestseller, the Reese Witherspoon Book Club X Hello Sunshine pick for December 2019 and is currently in development for TV.
The Long Drop
The Long Drop is Denise Mina's first foray into true crime. It is the story of Peter Manuel, a serial killer operating in the 1950s in Glasgow.
True crime stories always have two versions: the official verdict and the story people tell each other. Sometimes the difference is staggering.
On the 19th of September 1956 Peter Manuel broke into a suburban villa in Glasgow and shot three women in their beds. Then he made himself a ham sandwich.
The father of the house, William Watt, was five hours drive away, on a fly fishing holiday but police still suspect him. Watt was odd. He had taken the guard dog with him, which he never did. He established his alibi like a man trying to establish an alibi. William Watt was accused of the murders and sent to prison for three months.
Released, Watt decided to investigate the murders himself and put out the word that he would pay for information. Peter Manuel came forward and the two men met for a drink in Glasgow. They spent eleven hours together, drinking, driving, talking. The next time they met was in the High Court in Glasgow, where Manuel was accused of those murders and many others.
The Long Drop is a reimagining of the trial and of the drunken night the two men spent carousing in Glasgow.
Detective Alex Morrow series
Police detective Alex Morrow tackles crime in Glasgow, a Scottish city where the boundaries between the law-abiding and the criminal worlds are very blurred, including in her own family.
Blood Salt Water
The latest book in the series sees a murdered women's body surface in Loch Lomond, bringing Glasgow police detective Alex Morrow to nearby Helensburgh.
It seems to be a quaint and sleepy place but this apparently idyllic Victorian town is shot through with deception, lies and vested interests.
Red Road
As DI Alex Morrow investigates the death of a young businessman, she uncovers a vicious network of power and corruption reaching back 20 years. To the night Princess Diana died and a 14-year-old girl sat in a car with a dead body, the murder weapon still in her hand.
The fourth book in the series
Gods and Beasts
Recently back at work after the birth of her twins, Detective Sergeant Morrow is faced with the murder of a grandfather in a post office raid - a raid he appeared to assist with. Meanwhile a corrupt politician is fighting for his career and the police force itself is in turmoil.
The third book in the series and winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
The End of the Wasp Season
Set against the backdrop of the global financial recession, Morrow investigates the extremely brutal murder of a woman in a expensive suburb of Glasgow. But what is the connection with the suicide of a failed banker?
The second book in the series and winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
Still Midnight
The first in the series and Morrow has to deal with seems to be a botched kidnapping and ransom case when an elderly British Asian man is snatched from his home by a gang.
But the deeper she digs the more mysteries are revealed.
The Paddy Meehan series
Paddy Meehan is an aspiring reporter on the Scottish Daily News, a fictional newspaper in Glasgow in the 1980s. As she digs for stories, the crimes she uncovers shock the city, her family and herself.
The Last Breath
Published as A Slip of the Knife in the USA
Journalist Paddy Meehan now has it all: flash car, flat, dream job as Scotland's leading columnist. But when her ex-lover and fellow reporter Terry Patterson is found dead in ditch he leaves all his notes to her. And so she becomes the next target...
The third book in the series
The Dead Hour
Reporter Paddy Meehan has been promoted to the night shift. Coming across what seems like a typical domestic incident she accepts £50 to keep it out of the newspaper. But when the woman is found dead the next morning, she may get the story but could lose everything if word gets out about the bribe.
The second book of the series
More about the book and the BBC TV adaptation
The Field of Blood
Paddy Meehan dreams of being an investigative reporter at the Glasgow newspaper where she works as a copygirl. When a child goes missing in the city, unlike everyone else, Paddy doesn't believe the young boys blamed for the abduction acted on their own. But her digging leads her into conflict with her family, her community and puts her own life in danger.
The first book in the series
Sanctum
A standalone novel, published as Deception in the USA.
When Dr Susie Harriot is convicted of the brutal murder of Andrew Gow, a serial killer in her care, her husband Lachlan is determined to prove her innocence. He breaks into her attic office in their house and keeps a diary as he uncovers the secrets of the wife he seems he hardly knew.
The Garnethill series
Maureen O’Donnell is a former psychiatric patient with personal experience of surviving sexual abuse. But when people she knows die violently she musters her compassion, courage and humour to delve into their lives and find the truth.
Garnethill
Maureen O'Donnell is about to end her affair with psychotherapist Douglas. But after a drunken night out she wakes to find him tied to a chair in her living room with his throat slit. The police suspect her and her brother Liam, pharmacist without portfolio. Maureen has to enter the world of people who either won’t, or can’t, speak to the police to find the real killer.
This book, the first of the Garnethill series, won the CWA John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel
Exile
Maureen is working for Glasgow Woman’s Aid, helping victims of domestic abuse get out and away. There is no succor for her though, her family are still denying her sexual abuse by her father, she is haunted by a financial legacy from Douglas and her best friend and collaborator falls out with her. A woman on GWA’s files is found murdered in London and Maureen flees south to find out what happened to her.
The second book in the Garnehill series
Resolution
Maureen O'Donnell is back in Glasgow facing the darkest episode in her life: her father is polluting the city and she's wondering whether to kill him or herself. But when an stallholder in the flea market where she's working dies after a brutal beating, Maureen questions why anyone might want to kill the old woman...
The third book in the Garnethill series