Top 10 true crime novels

After a peripatetic childhood in Glasgow, Paris, London, Invergordon, Bergen and Perth, Denise Mina left school early. Working in a number of dead end jobs, all of them badly, before studying at night school to get into Glasgow University Law School.

Mira went on to study for a PhD at Strathclyde, misusing her student grant to write her first novel. This was Garnethill, published in 1998, which won the Crime Writers Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel.

She has since published more than a dozen novels. Her new novella is Rizzio, based on the true story of a brutal murder in 1566, in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots.

At the Guardian Mina tagged ten top true crime novels, including:

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

It’s a stretch to include this glorious book because it pushes the parameters beyond a tale of individual criminality to fictionalise the crimes of nation states, governments and the CIA, but it covers the crack wars of the 1980s and the attempted murder of Bob Marley, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible, which is surely what this form is all about.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is among Jonathan Lee's top ten assassination plots in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue