Book picks similar to
Beyond Cutting by Vicki Clifford


mystery
cc
scotland
crime-and-conspiracy

The Fifth Grave


Rob Jones - 2018
     Poised to return to work after a long bereavement leave, Detective Chief Inspector Jacob is called away from the sanctuary of his home to attend the grim discovery of human remains over a quarter of a century old. Found deep in woodland with its own grim history, they give little up, but he is soon confronted with local gossip of hauntings and witches. The mystery deepens when a second person is murdered in the same woods, and Jacob soon realises he is hunting a killer who will stop at nothing to keep the darkest of secrets buried in the past. Working alongside Dr Sophie Anderson, a criminal psychologist with her own damaged past, they close the net until tragedy strikes again in this gripping romantic suspense thriller. Set in the wild and beautiful Wiltshire Downs, The Fifth Grave is a fast-paced whodunit with a dash of humour and romance and a killer twist.

The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau


Graeme Macrae Burnet - 2014
    Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. One day, she simply vanishes into thin air and Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl's disappearance. He sets his sights on Manfred. As Manfred cowers beneath Gorski's watchful eye, the dark secrets of his past begin to catch up with him and his carefully crafted veneer of normalcy begins to crack. Graeme Macrae Burnet's masterful play on literary form featuring an unreliable narrator makes for a grimly entertaining psychological thriller that questions if it is possible--or even desirable--to know another man's mind.

Runaway


Peter May - 2015
    Yet before year's end three returned, and returned damaged. In 2015, a brutal murder forces those three men, now in their sixties, to journey back to London and finally confront the dark truth they have run from for five decades. Runaway is a crime novel covering fifty years of friendships solidified and severed, dreams shared and shattered and passions lit and extinguished; set against the backdrop of two unique and contrasting cities at two unique and contrasting periods of recent history.

Natural Causes


James Oswald - 2012
    So the murderer has killed himself; that just saves the time and cost of a trial. But a second murder days later bears haunting similarities to the first, even though once more the murderer swiftly confesses and kills himself.Detective Inspector Anthony McLean is investigating the discovery of a dead girl, walled up in the basement of an old Edinburgh mansion. She has been brutally murdered, her internal organs removed and placed around her in six preserving jars. The evidence suggests this all happened over sixty years ago, an attempt to re-enact an ancient ceremony that by trapping a demon in the dead girl’s body would supposedly confer immortality on the six men who took one of her organs each.McLean’s grandmother – the woman who raised him after his parents were killed when he was a young boy – dies after months in a coma following a stroke. On top of this he has to investigate a series of unusual, violent suicides and a cat-burglar who targets the homes of the recently dead. But as another prominent Edinburgh businessman is killed, he begins to suspect that there may be a connection between the murders, the suicides and the ritual killing of the girl found in the basement. The same names keep cropping up. He just can’t find a rational explanation as to how that connection works.As he digs deeper, and as the coincidences stack up, McLean is forced to consider an irrational explanation. Could there really be something evil stalking the city he has sworn to protect? And if so, how on earth can he hope to stop it?

Crash Point


John Carson - 2014
    As the investigation unfolds, a 25 year-old murder case is re-opened, and when Miller delves into the past, he finds that somebody had a secret that is costing people their lives. He also discovers the awful truth of who really killed his wife in a hit-and-run two years ago, and how his wife’s killer is coming after him…

Shadow Man


Margaret Kirk - 2017
    But does Anna know more about the murder than she's letting on?Police informant Kevin Ramsay's murder looks like a gangland-style execution. But what could he have stumbled into that was dangerous enough to get him violently killed?Mahler has only a couple of weeks to solve both cases while dealing with his mother's fragile mental health. But caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse, is ex-Met DI Lukas Mahler hunting one killer, or two?

Peacock's Tale: A Tartan Noir Murder Mystery (Peacock Johnson Scottish Mystery Series Book 1)


Stuart David - 2015
    Peacock’s wife thinks he did it, the police think he did it, even Frank McAlpine said he did it, moments before he died. But Peacock knows he’s innocent, and he knows he’s going to work out who really killed Frank to clear his name. But commiting crimes are more in Peacock’s line of work, he doesn’t have the first clue about how to solve one. Luckily, though, he knows a man who does, a man who owes him a favour. A second Scottish noir writer, Ian Rankin, has featured Peacock as the main villain in one of his bestselling Rebus novels- A Question of Blood. And Peacock feels he was somewhat misrepresented, made out to be much more of a hardened criminal than he actually is. He’d been planning to seek compensation from Rankin, on a massive scale, but now he sees an opportunity for Ian to make things good. If Rankin can use his detective skills to work out who actually killed Frank McAlpine then Peacock is willing to drop the action for libel. The only questions are, will Rankin agree. And is he up to the job.

The Wyatt Butterfly: Two Barrels of Classic Wyatt


Garry Disher - 2010
    Cool and efficient as always, Wyatt bypasses the alarm system, snatches the cash and eludes the cops. But can he make it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart?Port Vila Blues is Wyatt's fifth heist, this time leading him to a reckoning far from home. The Fallout finds Wyatt on a boat with policewoman Liz Redding and a fortune in stolen gems. He escapes, triggering a manhunt, but who exactly is hunting him? In this sixth Wyatt novel, Wyatt joins forces with his nephew to pull off one of his trickiest robberies-and his most dangerous task yet.'Disher's writing is as lean and relentless as his hero. No one does dryly poetic evocations of paranoia and human folly more seductively.' Australian

Aoife's Chariot: Mirrored Murder


Katherine Pathak - 2013
    Her brothers have given her the task of deciding what to do with their parents’ farm, which is slowly falling into disrepair. Imogen will not be rushed into passing judgement on the place. When she starts to carry out some research into the history of Kilduggan Farm, she inadvertently sets off a chain of events that ends in tragedy. Suddenly, Imogen and her psychologist husband, Hugh, find themselves faced with a seemingly insoluble puzzle. How can it be possible that an unexplained death in the present day can match, in every detail, an unsolved case from 40 years ago?As the past begins to catch up with Imogen, she realises that she must strive to discover the truth about her family, even if it means that nothing will ever be the same again…This is an intricately plotted novel, cleverly interwoven with subtle clues and the occasional red-herring. It will keep you guessing and the pages turning, right up until its final, shocking conclusion.Aoife's Chariot is the first novel in the Imogen and Hugh Croft Mysteries Series. It is an absorbing family saga, full of mystery and suspense. Husband and wife sleuths Imogen and Hugh Croft are first introduced to readers in this tense genealogical mystery with deathly consequences.

Terms of Restitution


Denzil Meyrick - 2021
    Following the advice of his priest and mentor, he moves clandestinely to London and becomes an ambulance driver. But when his old second-in-command Malky Maloney tracks him down on a London street, Finn knows he must return. Both his real family and his crime family face an existential threat from Albanian mobsters determined to take control of the Scottish underworld.Under the watchful eye of his charismatic mother, he must try to look after his lovelorn younger daughter and her older sister who is pregnant to his old enemy Joe Mannion’s son. His estranged wife, who has more than just a business relationship with Mannion, and his remaining son, crippled while serving in Afghanistan also require his attention. But most of all, he must take back what is his.Facing the forces of law and order under Detective Chief Superintendent Amelia Langley, a ruthless gang of Albanians and a beautiful but deadly Italian woman, Zander Finn struggles for survival in a rollercoaster ride of brutality, tenderness, misplaced loyalties and the utterly unexpected. The path to redemption is a perilous one, and it begins to look like Finn should have stayed in London.

Laidlaw


William McIlvanney - 1977
    In Glasgow, the city with the worst slums in Europe, a city of hard men, powerful villains, bitter victims and cynical policemen, Laidlaw uses unconventional methods.

Sins of the Father


David Harrison - 2006
    If it comes out, the tabloids will have a field day: Eddie Randall was a popular comedy actor in the 1960s. Nick goes in search of the truth and unexpectedly finds it impacts on a major insurance scam he is investigating. Then his estranged wife is found dead - and Nick realises that an unknown enemy is stalking him..."Occasionally brutal, but very readable... this writer seems to me to have real potential. I look forward to his next book." Martin Edwards, TANGLED WEB"Sins of the Father is a wonderful, exciting read full of twists and turns... This is a sterling effort from a new face on the crime scene."Chris Simmons, CRIMESQUAD"Sins of the Father is a rattling good read... a writer to watch for sure."Sharon Wheeler, REVIEWING THE EVIDENCEPraise for David Harrison (writing under the name TOM BALE):"What truly sells SKIN AND BONES is Bale's almost cinematic storytelling style, along the lines of what Lee Child does with his Jack Reacher series."Jim Winter, JANUARY MAGAZINE

Where the Bodies Are Buried


Christopher Brookmyre - 2011
    Elsewhere, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp is reluctantly earning a crust working for her uncle Jim's private investigation business. When Jim goes missing, Jasmine has to investigate for real.

The Blue Place


Nicola Griffith - 1998
    Born in Norway into the failed marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and an American businessman, she now makes Atlanta her home, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South. She glides easily between the world of silken elegance and that of sleaze and sudden savagery, equally at home in both; functional, deadly, and temporarily quiescent, like a folded razor.On a humid April evening between storms, out walking just to stay sharp, she turns a corner and collides with a running woman, Catching the scent of clean, rain-soaked hair, Aud nods and silently tells the stranger Today, you are lucky, and moves on—when behind her house explodes, incinerating its sole occupant, a renowned art historian. When Aud turns back, the woman is gone.

The Walker on the Cape (Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series Book 1)


Mike Martin - 2012
    At first everyone thinks it's a heart attack or stroke. But then it is discovered that he was poisoned. Who would do this and why? Finding that out falls to Sergeant Winston Windflower of the RCMP along with his trusted side-kick Eddie Tizzard. Along the way they discover that there are many more secrets hidden in this small community and powerful people who want to keep it that way. Windflower also discovers two more things; a love of living in a small community that is completely different from his up-bringing in a remote Indian reserve and maybe the love of his life. He gets a taste of East Coast food and hospitality as well as a sense of how crime and corruption can linger beneath the surface or hide in the thick blanket of fog that sometimes creeps in from the nearby Atlantic Ocean.