Wednesday, August 6, 2025

The Good Liar by Denise Mina

When Truth Becomes the Ultimate Weapon

The Good Liar succeeds as both a gripping thriller and a serious examination of expertise, authority, and moral courage. Mina has crafted a novel that works on multiple levels: as a puzzle-box crime story, a character study of institutional corruption, and a meditation on the personal cost of integrity.

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Denise Mina’s latest offering, The Good Liar, stands as perhaps her most audacious work yet—a forensic thriller that dissects not just murder but the very foundations of scientific truth and institutional complicity. This is a novel that understands the weight of expertise, the corruption of authority, and the devastating personal cost of doing what’s right when everything you’ve built depends on staying silent.

The story follows Professor Claudia Atkins O’Sheil, a blood spatter expert whose groundbreaking Blood Spatter Probability Scale (BSPS) has made her career and reputation. But as she prepares to give a career-defining speech about her most famous case—the Chester Terrace murders that saw William Stewart convicted for killing his father and stepmother—Claudia faces a horrifying realization: her evidence was wrong, and an innocent man is in prison because of her flawed methodology.

The Architecture of Deception

What makes The Good Liar exceptional is Mina’s intricate plotting that mirrors the very forensic science at its heart. The narrative unfolds like a blood spatter analysis in reverse—starting with the final pattern and working backward to reconstruct the original violence. Set across a single evening as Claudia prepares for her speech, the story moves between past and present with the precision of a scalpel, revealing layer after layer of institutional corruption, personal compromise, and the terrible mathematics of moral choice.

The central conceit is brilliant: Claudia’s BSPS, the very system that made her reputation, is fundamentally flawed. The irony cuts deep—a scientist whose life’s work in pursuing objective truth has become an instrument of injustice. Mina doesn’t just use this as a plot device; she explores the genuine scientific controversies around forensic evidence, from the debunked Shaken Baby Syndrome to discredited bite-mark analysis that convicted Ted Bundy.

The Chester Terrace murders themselves are rendered with chilling precision. Jonty Stewart and his fiancée Francesca Emmanuel, brutally killed in their London townhouse, their deaths reconstructed through crime scene footage that becomes increasingly unreliable as we learn more. The methodology that convicted William Stewart—topical DNA evidence, blood spatter patterns, timeline analysis—crumbles under scrutiny, revealing not just scientific fallibility but deliberate manipulation.

Character Studies in Complicity

Claudia emerges as one of Mina’s most complex protagonists. She’s neither heroic whistleblower nor calculating villain, but something far more human: a woman who’s spent years in willful denial, choosing comfort over conscience until the weight of her complicity becomes unbearable. Her relationship with her drug-addicted sister-in-law Gina serves as a parallel narrative of enabling and codependency, while her teenage sons represent both her motivation for maintaining the status quo and her reason for ultimately destroying it.

Lord Philip Ardmore is masterfully drawn as the embodiment of institutional power—charming, supportive, and absolutely ruthless in maintaining the system that benefits him. His relationship with Claudia is particularly well-crafted: part mentor, part patron, part manipulator, he represents the seductive nature of corruption dressed as respectability.

The supporting cast sparkles with Mina’s gift for social observation. Dr. Kirsty Parry, the nervous academic who first challenges Claudia’s methodology in court, becomes a symbol of how truth-tellers are discredited and destroyed. Charlie Taunton, the investigative journalist murdered for getting too close to the truth, represents the dangerous pursuit of accountability. Even minor characters like Elena Emmanuel and the gallery attendant feel lived-in and real.

The Weight of Words

Mina’s prose has evolved considerably since her early Garnethill trilogy, developing a more controlled, almost clinical precision that perfectly suits the forensic subject matter. Her dialogue crackles with subtext—conversations that seem innocent on the surface reveal themselves as negotiations, threats, and desperate attempts at self-preservation. The scientific terminology is woven seamlessly into the narrative without ever feeling like exposition, creating an authenticity that grounds the moral complexity in technical reality.

The structure itself becomes part of the story’s power. The timestamp headings—18:38, 18:41, 18:46—create a ticking-clock tension while the flashbacks reveal how we arrived at this moment of reckoning. It’s a technique that emphasizes both the inevitability of Claudia’s choice and the careful orchestration required to bring her to this point.

Mina’s social eye remains as sharp as ever. Her portrayal of academic hierarchies, class dynamics, and institutional power feels startlingly contemporary. The world of forensic science becomes a microcosm of broader societal issues: how expertise can be weaponized, how institutions protect themselves over individuals, and how the pursuit of truth often conflicts with the maintenance of power.

Where Truth Meets Fiction

The novel’s greatest strength lies in its exploration of how personal and professional integrity can become mutually exclusive. Claudia’s dilemma isn’t simply about revealing the truth—it’s about destroying everyone and everything she cares about in the process. Her sons will lose their prestigious school placement, her colleagues will lose their jobs, her mentor will be disgraced, and she herself will be professionally annihilated.

This moral complexity elevates The Good Liar beyond standard crime fiction into something more ambitious: a meditation on the corrupting nature of success and the terrible isolation that comes with moral clarity. When Claudia finally takes the stage, her decision to speak represents not heroism but a kind of professional suicide driven by rage and shame.

Yet Mina doesn’t allow us to see Claudia as simply heroic. Her previous willful blindness, her enabling of her sister-in-law’s addiction, her acceptance of professional benefits she knew were compromised—all of this complicates our sympathy. She’s not a whistleblower moved by pure conscience but a woman finally pushed beyond her capacity for self-deception.

Technical Mastery and Emotional Truth

The forensic elements feel meticulously researched without ever overwhelming the human story. Mina clearly understands both the technical aspects of crime scene analysis and the institutional pressures that can distort scientific objectivity. The Blood Spatter Probability Scale feels like a real methodology, complete with its own acronym and academic literature, making its fundamental flaws all the more disturbing.

The family dynamics between Claudia, her sons, and Gina provide emotional grounding for the larger institutional critique. Claudia’s relationship with addiction—both Gina’s drug use and her own addiction to denial—creates powerful parallels that never feel forced or overstated.

Minor Criticisms

While The Good Liar succeeds admirably in most respects, there are moments where the complexity threatens to overwhelm. The web of connections between characters—Philip’s relationship with Amelia Dibden, the various financial interests behind Claudia’s company, the historical abuse at their shared boarding school—occasionally feels overly intricate, requiring careful attention to track.

Some readers may find Claudia’s prolonged indecision frustrating, though this seems intentional—Mina is exploring how good people become complicit through a series of small compromises rather than grand moral failures. The timeline structure, while effective, sometimes makes it difficult to track character motivations across the fractured chronology.

Literary Legacy and Comparisons

The Good Liar represents a significant evolution in Mina’s work, building on the social consciousness of her earlier novels while embracing a more tightly controlled narrative structure. It shares DNA with contemporary forensic thrillers like Val McDermid’s work but brings a more explicitly political edge to the proceedings.

For readers familiar with Mina’s extensive bibliography—from the Garnethill trilogy through Conviction and The Less Dead—this feels like the culmination of themes she’s been exploring throughout her career: class, power, institutional corruption, and the ways ordinary people become complicit in systematic injustice.

The Verdict

The Good Liar succeeds as both a gripping thriller and a serious examination of expertise, authority, and moral courage. Mina has crafted a novel that works on multiple levels: as a puzzle-box crime story, a character study of institutional corruption, and a meditation on the personal cost of integrity.

The book’s most impressive achievement is how it makes Claudia’s final choice feel both inevitable and shocking. By the time she takes the microphone, we understand exactly why she must speak and exactly what it will cost her. The truth, as presented here, isn’t liberation—it’s destruction that might, possibly, be necessary.

This is essential reading for fans of intelligent crime fiction and anyone interested in how power operates in contemporary society. Mina has written a book that lingers long after the final page, raising questions about complicity, courage, and the price of speaking truth to power that feel urgently relevant to our current moment.

Similar Reads for Crime Fiction Enthusiasts

If The Good Liar captivated you, consider these complementary titles:

  • Val McDermid’s Tony Hill series – Particularly The Mermaids Singing, for its forensic psychology focus and institutional critique
  • John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener – For its exploration of institutional corruption and moral awakening
  • Laura Lippman’s Murder Takes a Vacation – Another complex female protagonist navigating truth and consequence
  • Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels – Especially Black and Blue, for its examination of police corruption and personal integrity
  • Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects – For psychological complexity and unreliable perspectives on truth
  • Chris Brookmyre’s All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye – For dark humor and institutional satire
  • S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep – For its exploration of memory, truth, and personal responsibility

The Good Liar stands as proof that the crime genre can tackle serious moral and social questions without sacrificing narrative tension or character development. It’s a book that trusts its readers’ intelligence and rewards careful attention with insights that extend far beyond the confines of the mystery itself.

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The Good Liar succeeds as both a gripping thriller and a serious examination of expertise, authority, and moral courage. Mina has crafted a novel that works on multiple levels: as a puzzle-box crime story, a character study of institutional corruption, and a meditation on the personal cost of integrity.The Good Liar by Denise Mina