'An outstanding mystery thriller… Noir fans won’t want to miss it' - Publishers Weekly (Starred)

'A riveting, brutal journey into the high stakes world of legacy art and inherited wealth' - Denise Mina, author of the Garnethill trilogy and The Long Drop

The Goldenacre – a masterpiece by the painter and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh – has been given to the people of Scotland. The beautiful canvas, the last work by the artistic genius, enthrals the art world, but behind it lies a dark and violent mystery.

Thomas Tallis, an art expert with a trouble past, is trying to uncover the truth about the painting's complex history, while dogged newspaper reporter Shona Sandison is investigating a series of shocking murders in Edinburgh.

Both investigators soon become engulfed in the machinations of money, crime and identity in a literary thriller set amid the seen and unseen forces at work in modern Scotland.

Winner of the Shamus Award for the Best First P.I. Novel

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'Philip Miller is a fine, painterly writer - Edinburgh at dusk, for example, is “a weave of shadows hung in a net of light” - and he has created a first-class thriller'

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'Unusual and elegant, Philip Miller’s third novel takes the Tartan Noir genre in some new and unexpected directions'

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'outstanding mystery thriller…In a style recalling the brutal dreariness of Le Carre, Miller describes a pivotal character as ‘sharp and severe as a snapped bone.’ It’s also an apt description of this biting tale of society in decline. Noir fans won’t want to miss it'

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'Its vivid sense of location is one of this engaging mystery’s great strengths'

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'The Goldenacre features a dense cast of vivid characters, not least Tallis, a tortured pilgrim worthy of a Graham Greene tale. The book—which explores through prose the interplay between light and darkness in the physical and moral worlds—is an ambitious and wonderfully realized work'

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'This book is a gripping exploration of the darker side of modern society'

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'Philip Miller's superb debut, The Goldenacre, is a prime example of Scottish noir'

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'Like its namesake, The Goldenacre occupies its own unclassifiable space, as much a meditation on beauty and loss as it is crime fiction'

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'The book for you if you are looking for something a little out of the ordinary in terms of your Scottish crime fiction'

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'Tartan noir hobnobs with the art world in The Goldenacre, Philip Miller's clever, complex and improbably touching thriller set in Edinburgh, a city whose reputation for quiet elegance and relative calm gets quite a workout'

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'Unputdownable'

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'This excellent well-plotted noir thriller pits unique characters against the hard-edges of modern life'

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'this story... is mesmerizing in its use of atmosphere, poetic language, and ingenious plot construction'

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'It is the magic way oddly juxtaposed words manage to convey the essence of a scene, the feelings of a character, or the ugliness of an act, more vividly than any dictionary-precise language, that makes The Goldenacre a thoroughly worthwhile read'

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'The Goldenacre is a prime example of a good Edinburgh novel… an excellent read for those who enjoy Tartan Noir and want to read something different to your usual hard-bitten detective story'

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'Philip Miller has written a stylish thriller which is a breath of fresh air and which deserves to be acknowledged as such ... It’s a crime novel for readers who think they don’t like the genre, and a literary novel for people who would normally stick to crime'

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'[Philip Miller] constructs an intricate and intelligent plot and peoples it with richly imagined and deeply realized characters . . .  An authoritative work on art and an accomplished work of art, The Goldenacre also represents a shrewd study of family dynamics and a splendid sample of literary crime fiction'

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'an artful whydunnit with a lyrical style and memorable characters, and captures several parts of Edinburgh perfectly'