Back

Mina Denise download all books 7 books

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).

This sixteen collection anthology revolves around a charm bracelet that brings misfortune to the holder. The tales are unique yet build off where the previous story left off. Beginning in the Georgia Mountains in 1803, continuing in 1839 and on into the twentieth century, the bracelet moves from one ill-fated soul whose story is unfolded until at the end of the tale, another person holds the bracelet and his or her story is told in the next chapter.

The fifteen contributors (Karin Slaughter opens and closes the anthology) seem to have enjoyed adding their spin to the book because all the inputs are well written and loaded with action and suspense. The “charmed characters” surprisingly for the most part come across as genuine regardless of their era and location (the bracelet gets around). LIKE A CHARM is gimmicky, but fans of interconnected short stories will appreciate this delightful thriller that lives up to its title as readers will enjoy this suspenseful interrelated compilation.

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.

The second novel in the wonderful Paddy Meehan series by Scotland 's princess of crime.

Paddy Meehan, Glasgow's aspiring journalist is back on the beat, trawling the streets of Glasgow for a story – something to prove she can write; that she's better at her job than all her male colleagues; anything that will get her off the terrible night shift that is slowly turning her brains to mush. And then she meets the woman with the poodle perm at the door of a wealthy suburb in the north of the city. It's just a domestic dispute, Paddy's told, although her instincts are alerted when she's slipped a £50 note to keep the story out of the papers. By the next morning the woman is dead; she's been tortured, beaten, and left to die. Paddy has found her story, but she's still got the £50; and with her father and brothers unemployed, and her upright Roman Catholic family perilously short of money, this could solve a lot of problems.

A day later, Paddy sees a body being pulled from the river. Another death, she's told; it's nothing to do with you; go home. But when Paddy talks to the wife of the dead man, she finds that the relationship between him and the murdered woman was closer than the police had imagined. Why have these people died? What were they trying to hide? And could this be the break Paddy's been waiting for? What follows is a deeply personal journey into the dark heart of a brutal economic recession, and the brutal bud of the drugs trade in the 1980s.

Lachlan Harriot is in a state of shock. His wife Susie has been convicted of the murder of serial killer Andrew Gow, a prisoner in her care. Unless Harriot can come up with grounds for an appeal in two weeks' time, Susie will be given a life sentence, depriving her of her home, her family and her two-year-old daughter.

Harriot is convinced that his wife, a respected forensic psychiatrist, is innocent, and each night climbs the stairs to Susie's study where he goes through her papers, laboriously transcribing onto his computer her case notes, her interviews with Gow and his new wife Donna, and the press cuttings from the trial. But his search for the truth soon raises more questions than answers.

Why had Susie stolen a set of prison files and then lied about it? What was the precise nature of her relationship with Gow? And, most importantly, what is it in her study that she doesn't want her husband to find? As the documents on Harriot's computer begin to multiply, his perception of what really happened between Gow and Susie becomes ever more complex. But first he must decide what he's to do with a discovery that involves violence, sexual obsession, lust and ultimate betrayal.

In her first stand-alone novel following her acclaimed Garnethill trilogy, Denise Mina looks at the shifting sands that separate fact and fiction, perception and reality, responsibility and culpability. Sanctum is a powerful psychological portrait of people living on the edge, an account of the deals with the devil that lie beneath their apparent respectability, and the terrifying journeys they are prepared to make in order to survive.

Maureen O'Donnell is facing the darkest episode in her life. She owes more than she makes in a year in back taxes; Angus Farrell, the psychologist who murdered her boyfriend, is up for trial, with Maureen as the reluctant star witness; and her abuser has arrived back in Glasgow in time for the birth of her sister's baby. On top of it all, Maureen – who identifies all too readily with the underdogs of this world – has become embroiled in someone else's family feud.

When an elderly stallholder at the flea market where Maureen and Leslie are selling illegally imported cigarettes dies in hospital after a brutal beating, Maureen questions why anyone might want to kill the woman popularly known as 'Home Gran'. She suspects Ella's son, but Si McGee is an upstanding member of the Scottish business community, runs a chain of estate agents and has a health club in Glasgow 's West End. But she soon discovers that the 'health club' fronts a much less respectable establishment. As Angus's trial approaches, once again Maureen is under threat, and this time she has very few protectors.

Paddy Meehan is home alone when there's a knock at the door. It's the police and they have bad news. Former boyfriend Terry Patterson's naked body has been found in a ditch. He's been tortured, hooded, then shot through the head: all hallmarks of an IRA assassination.

Paddy is devastated: Terry was her first lover; the sort of journalist she's always aspired to be. But why have the police come to her? Although she and Terry have had an on/off affair since they first worked together, she hasn't seen him for over a year.

She is therefore horrified to find that not only has Terry named her next of kin, but he has left her a huge Georgian house in Ayrshire and several suitcases full of notes.

What was Terry trying to tell her? As Paddy begins her investigation into his death, she realizes that if the secret he was about to expose was worth killing for, she is next in line.

The popular series