Denise Mina Books in Order
Explore Denise Mina books in order, with series lists, short summaries, background on her Glasgow crime and historical novels, plus guidance on where to start reading.
Last updated: December 16, 2025
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Publication Order
30 books
The Good Liar
by Denise Mina
2025
Blood-spatter scientist Professor Claudia O’Sheil built her stellar career on a revolutionary forensic tool and a notorious double-murder case. On the eve of a prestige lecture, new evidence convinces her she helped convict the wrong man—and exposing the lie could destroy her life.
Three Fires
by Denise Mina
2023
Three Fires reimagines the rise and fall of fifteenth-century friar Girolamo Savonarola, whose fiery sermons against luxury led to Florence’s Bonfire of the Vanities. As his moral crusade curdles into fanaticism, the book quietly echoes modern culture-war battles over power and belief.
The Second Murderer
by Denise Mina
2023
In 1940s Los Angeles, private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by a dying millionaire to find missing heiress Chrissie Montgomery. Sharing the hunt with rival detective Anne Riordan, he wades through Beverly Hills wealth, skid-row dives and a hotel corpse to learn why Chrissie ran.
Confidence
by Denise Mina
2022
Trying to force a blended family holiday, true-crime podcaster Anna McDonald watches it implode, then bolts with sidekick Fin when a YouTube urban explorer disappears. Chasing a stolen religious relic across Europe, they find cults, con artists and danger closing in again.
Rizzio
by Denise Mina
2021
This tense historical novella reconstructs the 1566 night when David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was dragged from her chamber and stabbed dozens of times. Court gossip, religious fury and personal betrayal collide in a single bloody evening.
The Less Dead
by Denise Mina
2020
Glasgow doctor Margo Dunlop discovers her birth mother was a teenage sex worker murdered years ago and written off as one of “the less dead”. Teaming up with her abrasive Aunt Nikki, she digs into a cold case that still has a vindictive killer attached.
The Last Siege of Bothwell Castle
by Christopher Brookmyre
2019
In this chilling short piece, well-meaning parents slowly realise their clever, difficult child has done something unspeakable. As guilt and denial war with fear, the story edges toward a reckoning that raises uncomfortable questions about love, responsibility and vengeance.
Conviction
by Denise Mina
2019
Anna McDonald’s comfortable Glasgow life implodes when her husband runs off with her best friend and an old scandal resurfaces. Clinging to a true-crime podcast about a sunken yacht, she recognises one victim and, with washed-up musician Fin, races across Europe to prove what really happened.
The Long Drop
by Denise Mina
2017
In 1950s Glasgow, businessman William Watt’s family has been slaughtered and he’s still the prime suspect. Desperate, he spends one long winter night drinking with petty criminal Peter Manuel—later charged as Scotland’s worst serial killer—trying to pry loose the truth.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
by Denise Mina
2015
Picking up after The Girl Who Played with Fire, this graphic novel finds Lisbeth Salander in intensive care, then on trial for multiple murders while a secret security faction tries to silence her. With Mikael Blomkvist’s help, she turns the tables in court.
Every Seven Years
by Denise Mina
2015
After years away, Elsa returns to the isolated Scottish island where school bullies made her life hell. When her old tormentor presses a mysterious book back into her hands, buried cruelties resurface and the line between memory, magic and revenge begins to blur.
Blood Salt Water
by Denise Mina
2015
DI Alex Morrow has been watching glamorous Roxanna Fuentecilla for signs of money laundering when the woman vanishes. The trail leads to the seaside town of Helensburgh, where respectable façades hide drugs, violence and a body rising from dark water.
The Girl Who Played with Fire
by Denise Mina
2014
When two reporters investigating sex trafficking are murdered and Lisbeth Salander’s fingerprints are found on the gun, she becomes Sweden’s most-hunted fugitive. The graphic novel tracks her fight to clear her name and face the violent figures from her past.
IDP
by Denise Mina
2014
In a flooded 2043, reality-show host Cait McNeil is the token outsider on a luxury vertical farm owned by the global elite. When the engineered animals turn violent and her boyfriend is murdered, she must expose a conspiracy that treats poor lives as expendable.
The Red Road
by Denise Mina
2013
Testifying against a brutal arms dealer, DI Alex Morrow is pulled into a new case when a young businessman is found dead. Evidence points back to the night Princess Diana died and to a teenage girl who once sat in a car with a corpse and a gun.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Book 2
by Denise Mina
2013
Continuing the graphic adaptation, this volume follows Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander as they unpick the Vanger family’s brutal secrets, confront a serial predator and uncover the real story behind Harriet’s disappearance.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Book 1
by Denise Mina
2012
This first graphic-novel volume adapts the opening of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, pairing journalist Mikael Blomkvist with hacker Lisbeth Salander as they begin investigating the decades-old disappearance of heiress Harriet Vanger on a remote Swedish island.
Gods and Beasts
by Denise Mina
2012
At a busy Glasgow post office, a grandfather calmly helps a gunman empty the tills before being cut down by bullets. As DS Alex Morrow hunts his killer, crooked politicians and compromised cops expose who really profits from the city’s pain.
The End of the Wasp Season
by Denise Mina
2011
Heavily pregnant DS Alex Morrow is called to a grotesque murder scene in an affluent Glasgow suburb just as a disgraced banker hangs himself in Kent. As she links the two families, buried rage and financial ruin twist into something even darker.
A Sickness in the Family
by Denise Mina
2010
In a once-grand London townhouse, the Usher family’s Christmas dinner curdles into horror as relatives begin dying one by one. Is their home cursed by old witchcraft, or is someone in this bitter, greedy clan killing for control of the estate?
Still Midnight
by Denise Mina
2009
Armed men burst into a Glasgow family’s home, shoot a daughter and abduct the aging shopkeeper, demanding a ransom that makes no sense. DS Alex Morrow must untangle secrets of identity, loyalty and prejudice before the hostage is lost.
The Red Right Hand
by Denise Mina
2007
Picking up after Empathy is the Enemy, John Constantine returns to a haunted Glasgow where a wave of suicides and an enigmatic preacher suggest his last case went terribly wrong. To stop the killing, he must face the fallout of his own magic.
Slip of the Knife / The Last Breath
by Denise Mina
2007
By 1990, Paddy Meehan has a flat, a column and a fragile sense of security—until her former lover, war reporter Terry Patterson, is found executed and leaves her his house and notebooks. Chasing the story, she stumbles into dangerous political secrets.
The Dead Hour
by Denise Mina
2006
On the night-shift crime beat, young reporter Paddy Meehan watches police walk away from a bloody “domestic” after money changes hands—and takes a bribe herself. When the woman is found murdered next day, Paddy risks career and life to expose the cover-up.
Empathy is the Enemy
by Denise Mina
2006
Ordinary bloke Chris Cole plays with a “harmless” spell and unleashes something he can’t control, dragging occult fixer John Constantine into the mess. Cursed with overwhelming empathy, Constantine follows a trail to a Scottish cult whose magic turns compassion lethal.
The Field Of Blood
by Denise Mina
2005
Glasgow, 1981. Eighteen-year-old copygirl Paddy Meehan dreams of being a reporter when a toddler is murdered and two local boys are accused, including her fiancé’s young cousin. Defying family and newsroom, she chases a truth nobody else wants to see.
Sanctum / Deception
by Denise Mina
2002
When celebrated forensic psychiatrist Susie Harriot is jailed for murdering a serial killer in her care, her husband Lachlan refuses to believe it. Night after night he combs her case files, only to uncover disturbing secrets about the woman he thought he knew.
Resolution
by Denise Mina
2001
Facing a looming tax bill, a traumatic court case and the return of her abuser, Maureen O’Donnell is drawn into another killing when an elderly market trader known as Home Gran dies after a savage beating. Finding the truth may cost her what stability she has left.
Exile
by Denise Mina
2000
Trying to rebuild her life in a Glasgow women’s shelter, Maureen O’Donnell is shaken when a battered resident turns up murdered and dumped in the river. Convinced the wrong man is being blamed, she follows a grim trail from hostels to London backstreets.
Garnethill
by Denise Mina
1998
Maureen O’Donnell, a survivor of abuse and a recent psychiatric patient, wakes up after a blackout to find her therapist boyfriend tied to a chair with his throat cut. Branded the prime suspect, she dives into Glasgow’s shadows to clear her name.
Where should I start?
If you want Glasgow police procedurals: Still Midnight → The End of the Wasp Season → Gods and Beasts.
If you prefer gritty working‑class mysteries: Garnethill → Exile → Resolution.
If newsroom crime stories appeal: The Field of Blood → The Dead Hour → Slip of the Knife / The Last Breath.
If you like twisty, modern thrillers: Conviction → Confidence.
If you want true‑crime and history blended: The Long Drop → Rizzio → Three Fires.
Author bio
Denise Mina grew up between places. Born in East Kilbride in 1966, she spent her childhood following her father’s engineering work around the North Sea oil boom, moving more than twenty times through Scotland and mainland Europe before she was an adult.
School was unsettled and she left at sixteen, drifting through the kinds of jobs that later turn up in her fiction: shifts in bars and kitchens, a meat‑packing plant, a cinema, and years as an auxiliary nurse working with elderly and terminally ill patients.
In her early twenties she went back into education, studying law at the University of Glasgow and winning a prize for forensic science. She stayed in academia for a PhD at Strathclyde, teaching criminology and criminal law while researching how mental illness is used to explain female offenders.
At home, though, the thesis stalled and a novel took its place. Instead of academic chapters she wrote Garnethill, a Glasgow murder story centred on Maureen O’Donnell, a survivor of childhood abuse and psychiatric wards. Published in 1998, it won a major debut‑crime award and grew into a trilogy with Exile and Resolution.
Mina kept digging into the city’s history and institutions. The Paddy Meehan novels—starting with The Field of Blood and continuing with The Dead Hour and Slip of the Knife / The Last Breath—follow a young reporter in 1980s Glasgow, fighting newsroom sexism, Catholic family expectations and the compromises of tabloid journalism. The first book was adapted for television, bringing her work to a wider audience.
Next came DS Alex Morrow, the lead of a sequence of Glasgow police novels that begins with Still Midnight. Morrow juggles twins, a complicated marriage and a half‑brother deep in organised crime while working cases that touch on bankers, politicians and small‑town gangsters. Two of those books, The End of the Wasp Season and Gods and Beasts, picked up major crime‑fiction prizes and helped cement Mina as a central voice in modern Tartan noir.
She has rarely stayed in one lane. Mina has written standalones such as The Long Drop, a reimagining of the 1950s Peter Manuel murders, and The Less Dead, about the families of women whose deaths were barely investigated. She has moved into historical territory with Rizzio and Three Fires, written an authorised Philip Marlowe novel in The Second Murderer, and created twisty, podcast‑fuelled thrillers in the Anna and Fin books Conviction and Confidence.
She also writes comics, plays and scripts when a story seems to fit better on the stage or the page in panels.
Her comics work includes a year on Hellblazer, the original John Constantine series, and the original graphic novel A Sickness in the Family, as well as graphic adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium thrillers. Along the way she has picked up awards from crime‑writing bodies in the UK and abroad, and was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame.
Today Mina lives and works in Glasgow. Her books mix bleak humour, anger at injustice and a close eye for how ordinary people navigate power, class and violence. Whether she is writing about a slum tower block, a newsroom, a royal court or a flooded future, the voices feel lived‑in and the moral questions rarely come with easy answers.
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