My holiday heaven? It’s cocktails and crime by the pool

Ever since Sarah Koenig’s groundbreaking podcast, Serial, launched in 2014, millions of us have become engrossed by long-form investigations into murder, fraud, jewel heists, and unsolved mysteries.

In fact, in between sunbathing, reading and ordering another chilled aperitif, I’ve spent most of my Spanish escape with headphones glued to my ears, listening to detailed descriptions of autopsies, police interrogations and newly uncovered evidence. Cocktail with a side of crime, anyone?

Of course, it’s not just audio storytelling that’s grabbing our attention with grisly tales. In our cover interview, on pages 6&7, crime writer Denise Mina talks to PatriciaAnn Young about why books like her own keep soaring to the top of the charts. Discussing our mysterious commitment to the genre, she said: “The lovely thing about crime fiction is that it offers the promise of resolution and absolute answers, when we don’t often get answers in reality. That’s why we’re reading so much of it now. It’s satisfying in such an uncertain world.”

Fans of Mina’s thrillers – including her 2019 novel, Conviction, soon to be adapted into a Hollywood TV series – can turn to page 14 to learn about another spine-tingling read from Philip Miller. His third book, The Goldenacre, sees an art expert unearth the dark and violent past of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh masterpiece – a story which Mina herself called a “riveting, brutal journey into the high stakes world of legacy art and inherited wealth”.

If I wasn’t currently enjoying 35-degree heat, that description would give me chills!