Denise Mina is an author that wears many different hats. She could be considered a jack of all trades in the entertainment world, which can easily be seen through her extensive work in the field. She has done everything from authoring fully fledged novels to short stories to documentaries to even writing for a comic book, Hellblazer. It is not hard to like Denise Mina as a person or an author because her candor is top-notch, which can be seen from her many interviews. Denise Mina is an author on a stage all her own.
Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. From there she moved time and time again, having to call a new city home yearly, if not less than that. She moved a total of 21 times in 18 years, all due to her father’s job as an engineer, which forced them to follow the North Sea oil boom in Europe of the 1970s.
Denise Mina left school at the age of 16 and bounced around from job to job, each one providing very little pay. She has been everything from a barmaid to working in a meat factory. Denise Mina finally settled on auxiliary nursing. But like early years of moving from place to place, she continued to move from job to job. Until at the age of 21 she passed exams and got to study law at Glasgow University.
There Denise Mina taught criminology and criminal law while at the same time trying to complete her thesis on the subject of mental illness for female offenders. While staying home, supposedly to write her thesis, the author in Denise Mina was born. Instead of writing a thesis, Denise Mina wrote a novel, Garnethill.
Garnethill was published in 1998 by Transworld and it went on to win the Crime Writers Association John Creasy Dagger for the best first crime novel and later spawned two sequels. Another standalone novel followed quickly after that, Deception, and Denise Mina had found the career she was born to do.
Books in order of publication by series:
Garnethill Books
| Garnethill | (1998) | |
| Exile | (2000) | |
| Resolution | (2001) |
Paddy Meehan Books
| The Field Of Blood | (2005) | |
| The Dead Hour | (2006) | |
| Slip of the Knife/The Last Breath | (2007) |
John Constantine, Hellblazer Books
| Empathy is the Enemy | (2006) | |
| The Red Right Hand | (2007) |
Alex Morrow Books
| Still Midnight | (2009) | |
| The End of the Wasp Season | (2011) | |
| Gods and Beasts | (2012) | |
| The Red Road | (2013) | |
| Blood Salt Water | (2015) |
Millennium: The Graphic Novels
| The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Book 1 | (2012) | |
| The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Book 2 | (2013) | |
| The Girl Who Played with Fire | (2014) | |
| The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest | (2015) |
Standalone Novels
| Sanctum/Deception | (2002) | |
| The Long Drop | (2017) | |
| Conviction (Anna and Fin # 1) | (2019) | |
| The Less Dead | (2020) | |
| Confidence (Anna And Fin #2) | (2022) |
Short Stories/Novellas
| Every Seven Years | (2015) |
Graphic Novels
| IDP | (2014) |
Anthologies
| Crimespotting | (2009) | |
| Bloody Scotland | (2019) |
Oak Lawn Library Friends 