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  • Published: 31 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787304284
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $50.00
Categories:

The Good Liar





What will it take to tell the truth when your life depends on a lie? This is the question a blood spatter expert grapples with when she realises she sent the wrong person to prison. The 20th novel from NYT bestseller and Costa-shortlisted crime writer Denise Mina, for fans of Tana French and Elly Griffiths.

'Authentic, compelling and written with wit so sharp it’ll cut your fingers. Once again, Denise Mina shows the rest of us how it’s done' ERIN KELLY

Blood washes off, but guilt stains . . .

A year ago, a father and his fiancée were brutally stabbed in their opulent London townhouse, sparking the most high-profile murder investigation in recent history. Blood spatter expert Doctor Claudia O’Sheil’s evidence put the killer behind bars—or so everyone believes. But since the trial, recently widowed Claudia has learned a horrific truth. Her evidence and her testimony were wrong. And someone she knows made sure of it.

Now, as she takes the stage before the elite of London to give a career-defining speech, Claudia faces a devastating choice. Protect her children and her livelihood with her continued complicity, or blow the whole conspiracy apart and reveal the truth: not only is the real murderer still out there, but they’re in the audience.

As Claudia steps toward the microphone, she revisits that fateful night. What really happened? And what speech will Claudia give?

A taut, intelligent suspense novel for fans of Val McDermid, Elly Griffiths and Tana French, The Good Liar is about power, class, and the lengths we're willing to go for family.

Praise for Denise Mina
'Crime-writing royalty' IAN RANKIN
'A delight' ANN CLEEVES
'Highly original' THE TIMES
'Darkly brilliant' OBSERVER

  • Published: 31 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787304284
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $50.00
Categories:

About the author

Denise Mina

Denise Mina is the author of the Garnethill trilogy, the Paddy Meehan series and the Alex Morrow series. She has won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award twice and was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame in 2014. The Long Drop won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2017 as well as the Gordon Burn Prize and was named by The Times as one of the top ten crime novels of the decade. Conviction was the co-winner of the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2019 and was selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club. Denise has also written plays and graphic novels, and presented television and radio programmes. She lives and works in Glasgow.

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Praise for The Good Liar

Authentic, compelling and written with wit so sharp it’ll cut your fingers. Once again, Denise Mina shows the rest of us how it’s done

Erin Kelly

Filled with intelligence, intensity, and empathy, The Good Liar is a taut, propulsive mystery about family, truth, and morality. Denise Mina is such a talent

Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of The Note