Our excellent crime writing community have been busy, and August sees a gang of great releases that will boss themselves onto your bookshelves and, hopefully, the bestseller lists!

Cover Your Tracks by Claire Askew
Published by Hodder & Stoughton

Claire Askew brings us the third instalment in her awardwinning DI Helen Birch series. We pick up with Helen preoccupied by her brother’s troubles. But then a case comes her way that she can’t shake. Robertson Bennet returns to Edinburgh after a 25-year absence in search of his parents and his inheritance. But both have disappeared.

No one can ever really know the secrets kept between husband and wife. But as Birch slowly begins to unravel the truth, terrible crimes start to rise to the surface.

Beautifully written and ingeniously plotted, Cover Your Tracks confirms Claire Askew as a major new talent in crime fiction.

The Innocent Dead by Lin Anderson
Published by Macmillan

We cannot get enough of Lin Anderson’s Rhona MacLeod series, and the latest installment will have readers on the edge of their seats, as usual.  Rhona MacLeod who must solve the case of a young girl who went missing forty-five years ago.Mary McIntyre’s disappearance tore the local community apart, inflicting wounds that still prove raw for those who knew her.So when the present-day discovery of a child’s remains are found in a peat bog south of Glasgow, it seems the decades-old mystery may finally be solved. Not only that but memories long-buried by the young girl’s best friend are returning, memories that begin to reveal her role in her friend’s disappearance and perhaps even the identity of the killer . . .

Sight Unseen by Sandra Ireland
Published by Polygon

1648. Alie Gowdie marries Richard Webster during a turbulent time in Scotland’s history. Charles I is about to lose his head, and little does Alie know that she too will meet a grisly end within the year.

2019. Sarah Sutherland is struggling to cope with the demands of her day job, caring for her elderly father and keeping tabs on her backpacking daughter. She wanted to be an archaeologist, but now in her forties, she is divorced, alone, and there seems to be no respite, no glimmer of excitement on the horizon. However, she does have a special affinity with the Kilgour Witch, Alie Gowdie, who lived in Sarah’s cottage until her execution in 1648, and Sarah likes nothing better than to retreat into a world of sorcery, spells and religious fanaticism.

Sandra Ireland continues to blend thriller with history and mythology to great effect, and we’re excited to see where this new series takes us!

Still Life by Val McDermid
Published by Little, Brown

Hands up if you’re ready for another Karen Pirie mystery? Us too! And, as ever with Val McDermid, she doesn’t disappoint.

When lobster fishermen pull a body out of the sea, local police quickly discover the murdered man was the prime suspect in a mysterious disappearance ten years before. Cold case detective Karen Pirie’s name is on the file as the last person to review the case. As she starts to unpick the threads of the past, Karen finds herself at the heart of a tangled web of dark and troubling secrets . . .

The Less Dead by Denise Mina
Published by Harvill Secker

A new book from Denise Mina is always a treat, and she often leads us to unexpected places. Her new book follows Margo as she goes in search of her birth mother for the first time. She learns that her mother, Susan, was a sex worker murdered soon after Margo’s adoption and that her killer has never been found. Margo then discovers her aunt, Nikki, who has received threatening and haunting letters from the murderer, for decades. She is determined to find him, but she can’t do it alone…

The Less Dead is a brilliant, thought-provoking and heart-wrenching new thriller about identity and the value of a life.

Don’t forget this bonus suggestion . . .

The Dance of the Serpents by Oscar de Muriel
Published by Orion

Oscar de Muriel may be from Mexico, but he has been writing his Victorian Edinburgh crime mysteries starring his detectives Frey and McGray for years. The Dance of the Serpents is the sixth book in the series and provides all the gothic thrills his fans have grown to love.

It’s December 1889, and Edinburgh police’s secret subdivision ‘The Commission for the Elucidation of Unsolved Cases Presumably Related to the Odd and Ghostly’ is about to have its worst day. When the exiled English Inspector Ian Frey, and his Scottish boss ‘Nine-Nails’ McGray are summoned to a meeting in the middle of the night with the Prime Minister, they are warned that Queen Victoria – the most powerful person in the world – wants them both dead.

To be pardoned they must embark on a mission so dangerous that they might be saving Her Majesty the job of executing them. The case they must solve ties together the dark history of the Pendle witches, with the tragic case of McGray own sister, to a conspiracy within the highest office in the land…