Sam Winter
DI Sam Winter Edinburgh Thrillers
Meet DI Sam Winter. She first crossed paths with Rob Marshall in Cuts Both Ways (Marshall 9) and now has a series of her own: sharp, darkly funny Scottish crime fiction set in Edinburgh.
Current status: Book 3, No Need To Fear, is out on 30 November 2026 – preorder now.
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A missing baby. A desperate woman on the run. A truth nobody wants uncovered.
A newborn is taken from a locked house in Edinburgh. No ransom. No witnesses. Just an empty cot and parents with power to burn.
DI Sam Winter is called into the abduction of nine-week-old Kai Drummond, taken while his wealthy parents were out celebrating the launch of their high-profile charity foundation. The family want results fast, the press want blood and the politicians circling the Drummonds want the story buried.
The abductor is already moving, changing her appearance, gambling everything on a plan she can’t afford to get wrong. Because the truth nobody wants to say out loud is the most dangerous one.
As Winter races the clock across Scotland, the case cracks open old grief, addiction and a family history built on money and secrets. And with every mile Kai is taken further from home, the chances of bringing him back alive get thinner.
Two children. A politician with secrets. A kidnapper with nothing left to lose.
A mother is knocked out on her own doorstep in Edinburgh. Her two young children are gone, sedated and photographed in the boot of a car nobody recognises. The message to their father is clear: no police, or only one comes home.
DI Sam Winter is pulled into the abduction of Barnaby and Marina Harkness, taken while their father — MSP Chris Harkness — sat in a Holyrood committee room, doing his best to shield a billionaire from a financial scandal that could bring them both down. Harkness wants the police kept close enough to look cooperative and far enough away to be useless. The press want access. And the powerful men circling the family want the whole thing to disappear quietly.
The abductor has been watching, planning, and waiting for months. He’s not after money. He’s after something that people with serious money have worked very hard to keep buried.
As Winter unpicks the Harkness family, the case opens up a world of political corruption, charitable fraud and a grief so old it’s calcified into something dangerous. And with two children in the hands of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing, the clock is running from the moment it starts.
A teenage girl. A message on a mirror. A mother who can’t remember the night before.
When fifteen-year-old Olivia Deacon vanishes from her Edinburgh bedroom overnight, the only evidence is a cracked mirror with two words written in red: NEVER FORGET. Her mother woke at half past six and found the room empty – but she wasn’t asleep. She was unconscious. The wine was a gift.
DI Sam Winter is pulled into Olivia’s disappearance as the case splinters in every direction: a deadbeat father declared missing and probably dead, a boyfriend with a convenient alibi, a drilled phone and a locked laptop, plus a girl who kept her secrets in notebooks rather than on screens. Olivia didn’t run. She was taken by someone who knew the alarm code, knew the routines, and took the time to leave a message nobody yet understands.
The words on the mirror aren’t random. They’re a reckoning — for something that happened long before Olivia was old enough to know about it. As Winter unpicks the tangle of loss, silence and buried resentment at the heart of the family, she begins to understand that whoever took Olivia isn’t finished. And that the clock has been running for a very long time.