Lin Anderson

"Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!" is the advice Teresa Rae Wood shares with the listeners of her local radio show, Modern Pioneers, and the advice she strives to live by every day. She has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they received unexpected news that Teresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.

A teenager is found strangled and mutilated in a Glasgow flat. Leaving her warm bed and lover in the middle of the night to take forensic samples from the body, Rhona MacLeod soon recognizes the likeness between herself and the dead boy and is horrified to think that he might be the son she gave up for adoption seventeen years before. Amidst the turmoil of her own love life and consumed by guilt from her past, Rhona sets out to find both the boy's killer and her own son. But the powerful men who use the Internet to trawl for vulnerable boys have nothing to lose and everything to gain by Rhona MacLeod's death.

Studio sleuths When Frank and Joe visit a local movie and TV studio they stumble across a real-life drama - someone has murdered screenwriter Bennet Fairburn. To track the killer the brother detectives go undercover as gofers at the studio. From the start it's clear the Hardys have been cast as victims in a sinister plot. A series of deadly "accidents" stalk the brother team, and while shooting a TV series Frank and Joe find themselves on the wrong end of some lethal stunts. The clues they need are buried in the script, but unless they uncover the villain fast, the brothers Hardy will be show biz history.

A teenage boy is found murdered in a Glasgow flat. Forensic scientist, Rhona Macleod is called to the scene, but her grim task is made even more unsettling than usual by the boy's remarkable resemblance to her - and the fact that she gave up a baby boy for adoption seventeen years before. Racked with guilt, she sets out to find the boy's killer.

When Mark Howitt is invited back to Leila's flat and ordered to strip, he thinks he's about to have the experience of his life. Waking later he finds Leila gone from his side. Keen to leave, he opens the wrong door and finds he's entered a nightmare; behind the swaying Barbie dolls that hang from the ceiling is the body of the girl he just had sex with. Rhona Macleod's forensic investigation of the scene reveals the red plaited silk cord used to hang Leila to be a cingulum, a Wiccan artefact used in sex magick. Sketches of sexual partners hidden in the dolls provide a link to nine powerful men, but who are they? As the investigation continues, it looks increasingly likely that other witches will be targeted too.

When the body of a pregnant teenager is found in a Hall of Mirrors with the full-term foetus surgically removed, forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is called in to assist the police. Suspicion falls on Jeff Coulter, a psychotic inmate at a nearby hospital whose hobby is making Reborns - chillingly realistic baby dolls.

A hen night in Glasgow leaves the bride-to-be dead on a toilet floor. Her body is twisted, her face a mask of terror. Who would kill a girl just before her wedding? Dr Rhona MacLeod and her team are called in to find out. As they go through the evidence, they find themselves in a world where sex is bought and sold, and more violent death is lying in wait.

Enigmatic Englishman Patrick de Courvoisier is asked to look into the disappearance of Angele Valette, actress and star of the new film, "The Black Pearl."

"From hardboiled police procedural to historical mystery, from the wildly comic to the supernatural, Crimespotting brings together ten bestselling writers in a fantastic collection of specially commissioned crime stories inspired by the city of Edinburg."--Jacket.

450 pages : 24 cm