The Anna Scavolini Mysteries - Volume One: three gripping crime novels Paperback – 10 Dec. 2021

What can I say. I enjoyed it. I won’t spoil it for anyone , they are good. I’ll be looking out for more from this author. Good afternoon.

I found these books to be much better in terms of the written English than many books of this type. The writing flows well and is easy to read.Some parts of the plot were a bit unbelievable hence the 4 mark. I would certainly read other books by this author

Fantastic three books all different stories and yet a theme running through them. Loved the characters excellent writing can’t wait for the next book.

I loved these books. I loved their sense of the sheer madness of Glasgow and I loved Anna and Zoe.

The series get better as they go along. Keeps you guessing and engaged. Would recommend

This is a great binge read for crime enthusiasts. Reaching the end of the first novel leaves you more than keen to move on to the second, and when you get to the end of that book three is there for you too. Hopefully thee will be a book four before long. All three novels have twists and turns and unanticipated developments. Mackenzie is adapt at bringing together apparently unrelated threads. The main character, Anna, and her long term friend, Zoe, with their emotional baggage and dogged determinism to expose and end wrongdoing, are complex and convincing. A range of fascinating characters are introduced in each book, and the reader is delighted to see some of them cropping up in a subsequent book. The standard of writing is excellent. Highly recommended!

I was not over enthusiastic about the the first book in the series which I read some time ago but Cruel Summer demonstrates that the writer has matured his characters and got a bit closer to Glasgow. The plot is a gangster version of The Manchuria Candidate and none the worse for that but the joy of this book is Fin, an Irish and more or less criminal version of Nessa from Gavin and Stacey. Volume 3 is not quite as good, conspiracy is at the heart of all three books and in The Shadow Men the conspiracy is so overblown that the writer seems to be obsessive.

Great read

I love Dr Anna Scavolini and her fiend Zoe Callahan. Anna is headstrong, opinionated and has a knack for getting herself embroiled in the most complicated situations and of course, being able to solve the crimes ahead of the police, to their dismay. She is not perfect: she copes with her bipolar disorder, while being a lecturer of Criminology at the University of Glasgow (my alma mater) and raising her son Jack. By the end of the trilogy things seem to have come full circle and Zoe -who used to receive Anna at her place while teenagers- is now living with Anna and Jack (just like they used to dream all those years ago). Zoe is the other side of Anna’s coin, the yin to her yang.Michael has a beautiful prose and his fast paced stories are more alike to watching a film of the film noir kind than to reading a book. Glasgow is a major character in the stories and it’s descriptions are so good I could walk again through its streets and smell the spring on a “taps aff” afternoon at Kelvingrove Park.No kilts or bagpipes on this trilogy, just Scotland in all its living beauty-warts and all. Highly recommended.

Really enjoyed this boxset of crime books. The two characters, Anna and Zoe, are like chalk and cheese in a lot of ways. They have been friends since school. They both have big hearts and get into all sorts of trouble mainly trying to do the right thing and help others. Well worth a read

These three books were poignant in their exploration of the “underground “ in our culture.Very well written.Sad that they had to be written!