Below is the complete list of Denise Mina’s Anna and Fin books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Anna and Fin Books
About Anna and Fin
Denise Mina’s Anna and Fin series pairs two accidental investigators whose partnership begins at one of the worst moments in both their personal lives. Anna McDonald is a Glasgow mother with a carefully concealed past and an obsession with true-crime podcasts; Fin Cohen is a former rock star whose wife, Estelle, happens to be Anna’s best friend. When Anna’s husband leaves her for Estelle, the two abandoned spouses are thrown together, and their shared domestic catastrophe becomes the unlikely beginning of a crime-solving partnership. The series currently consists of Conviction and its sequel, Confidence.
Conviction begins with Anna’s apparently secure family life collapsing in a matter of minutes. Her husband, Hamish, announces that he is leaving with Estelle and taking Anna’s two daughters with him. Anna retreats into one of her usual forms of escape: a true-crime podcast called Death and the Dana, investigating a yacht that sank in the Mediterranean with several people aboard.
The podcast stops being a distraction when Anna recognizes the name of one of the victims. She knew him before she became Anna McDonald, during a period of her life she has worked hard to conceal. Convinced the podcast’s interpretation of events is wrong, she begins investigating for herself.
Fin arrives in similarly poor emotional condition after being abandoned by Estelle. Once a successful musician, he has struggled with fame and anorexia, and he initially seems an improbable companion for Anna. Their impromptu journey across Europe changes that. As they investigate the Dana case, they begin recording their own account, while social media attention exposes Anna to people connected with the identity she has tried to leave behind.
By Confidence, Anna and Fin are no longer simply two betrayed spouses thrown together by circumstance. They have become journalists and true-crime podcasters with an established working relationship, while the complicated rearrangement of their families continues around them. A disastrous shared holiday gives them reason to welcome a new investigation when young filmmaker and online personality Lisa Lee disappears from a Scottish seaside town.
Lisa’s final online footage shows her exploring an abandoned French château and discovering a valuable Roman silver casket. When the artifact subsequently appears for auction in Paris with a multimillion-euro valuation and possible religious significance, Anna and Fin suspect that the casket and Lisa’s disappearance are connected. Their search carries them through Europe and into a world of art trafficking, wealthy collectors, con artists, religious interests, and people willing to manipulate the stories circulating online.
Podcasting is more than a fashionable device in these novels. Mina uses it to examine who gets to construct the accepted version of a crime. Amateur investigators can expose failures ignored by authorities, but online audiences can also turn speculation into certainty with alarming speed. Anna understands that danger particularly well because her own survival has depended upon controlling what other people know about her.
Fin provides an effective counterweight to her secrecy and intensity. Their connection is neither a conventional detective partnership nor a simple romantic pairing; it grows from shared humiliation, damaged families, humor, argument, and the strange intimacy created by investigating frightening stories together.
The two books consequently have a lighter, more mobile quality than Mina’s Glasgow-centered police series while retaining her suspicion of easy narratives. Anna and Fin travel widely and encounter extraordinary conspiracies, yet the fundamental question remains characteristic of Mina: when everyone is telling a story about what happened, which version deserves to be believed?