The Good Liar

by Denise Mina

As the story opens, acclaimed forensic scientist Claudia O’Sheil is about to address a prestigious audience in London. She’s expected to give a speech about her most famous criminal case, where her evidence secured the conviction of a killer in a high profile double murder.

But that’s not the speech she’s going to give. Instead she’s going to reveal a truth that will ruin her career and cause people to lose their jobs, as well as undermine criminal convictions in cases the world over.

The story then flashes into the past, to a time when Claudia was grieving the loss of her husband who had died in a car accident, leaving her as the debt-burdened widowed mother of two children. She and her then-boss and mentor, Lord Philip Ardmore, were called to a crime scene. An old friend of Philip’s has been brutally stabbed to death, along with his fiancée.

The police quickly identify a suspect. Claudia initially thinks he is innocent, but he subsequently confesses to the crime, and evidence using Claudia’s Blood Spatter Probability Scale nails his conviction.

The story continues to unfold across the two timelines. In the present-day narrative, the minutes tick by as Claudia prepares to give her speech, though we aren’t told until near the end what the secret is that she’s about to reveal. The past storyline details the original investigation as well as delving into the layered relationships and motivations of the characters.

Mina is a master storyteller; her characters are nuanced and believable, and the tension builds as events unfold. The many twists and turns in the plot make The Good Liar an unputdownable read.

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Her father was an oil engineer, so she attended a variety of schools as her family moved around Europe for his job.

Now the author of twenty novels, she never planned to be a writer. She left school at 16 and took a series of jobs (bartender, cook, meat factory employee, and nursing home helper). At twenty-one she decided to enter college, after taking night courses to qualify for Glasgow University’s law program. She taught law and criminology courses in the 1990s while pursuing a PhD program at Strathclyde University, focusing her research on the prevalence of mental-illness diagnoses in female criminal offenders.

As a way of exploring the topic she was studying, she started drafting a novel, which eventually grabbed the interest of an agent and a publisher. Garnethill, published in 1998, quickly became a bestseller, winning the John Creasey Memorial Dagger award for best first crime novel from the Crime Writers’ Association.

Mina’s writing quickly took off from there. She wrote two more novels in the Garnethill series, a five-novel series featuring Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, another three-novel series featuring journalist Paddy Meehan, two books featuring Anna & Fin (the first of which, Conviction, was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick), and several standalone novels, of which The Good Liar is the most recent.  A prolific writer, she has also written plays and has scripted several graphic novels.

She has won numerous awards and accolades, including induction into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame. She lives in Glasgow with her partner (a forensic psychologist) with whom she has two sons, now in their twenties.

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