Denise Mina

Responding to a late night-call, Paddy Meehan arrives at an elegant villa, where a calm blonde with blood running from her mouth answers the door. She has already convinced the police to leave and soon Paddy realizes how—she slips 50 bucks into Paddy’s hands and begs her to keep the incident, whatever it is, out of the press. The next morning Paddy sees the lead news story: The blonde woman has been murdered, and far from the spoiled trophy wife Paddy assumed her to be, the victim turns out to be a prosecution lawyer with a social conscience. Paddy begins to make connections no one else has seen. When she witnesses the body of a suicide victim being pulled from the river shortly afterward, Paddy suspects links between the two deaths and follows her idea to its shocking—and deadly—conclusion.

The first in a new series by Scotland’s princess of crime, Denise Mina.

When the body of a four-year-old boy is found tortured and battered to death, it is assumed the child has been the victim of a vicious sexual predator. Instead the police are led, not to the house of an adult killer, but to the doors of two eleven-year-old boys.

Fresh from school, Paddy Meehan has just started work on the Scottish Daily News. Determined to be an investigative journalist, she also wants to be financially independent. But her colleagues — hard-drinking chauvinists to a man — believe a woman’s place to be in the home, and preferably in the bedroom. And Paddy’s family too: all they want is for her to get married to her fiancé, Sean, and have children of her own. Then Paddy discovers that one of the boys charged with the child’s murder is Sean’s cousin, Callum. Soon Callum’s name is all over the News, and her family blames Paddy. Shunned by Sean and those closest to her, Paddy finds herself dangerously alone.

Set in Glasgow in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and unemployment that…

Maureen O’Donnell wasn’t born lucky. A psychiatric patient and survivor of sexual abuse, she’s stuck in a dead-end job and a secretive relationship with Douglas, a shady therapist. Her few comforts are making up stories to tell her psychiatrist, the company of friends, and the sweet balm of whisky. She is about to end her affair with Douglas when she wakes up one morning to find him in her living room with his throat slit.

Viewed in turn by the police as a suspect and as an uncooperative, unstable witness, Maureen is even suspected by her alcoholic mother and self-serving sisters of being involved. Worse than that, the police won’t tell her anything about Douglas’s death.

Panic-stricken and feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen begins to doubt her own version of events. She retraces Douglas’s desperate last days and picks up a horrifying trail of rape, deception…and suppressed scandal at a local psychiatric hospital where she had been an inmate. But the patients won’t talk and the staff are afraid, and when a second brutalized corpse is discovered, Maureen realises that unless she gets to the killer first, her life is in danger.

Alex Morrow is not new to the police force-or to crime-but there is nothing familiar about the call she has just received. On a still night in a quiet suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, three armed men have slipped from a van into a house, demanding a man who is not, and has never been, inside the front door. In the confusion that ensues, one family member is shot and another kidnapped, the assailants demanding an impossible ransom. Is this the amateur crime gone horribly wrong that it seems, or something much more unexpected?

As Alex falls further into the most challenging case of her career, Denise Mina proves why “if you don’t read crime novels, Mina is your reason to change” (Rocky Mountain News).