Val McDermid Books in Order

Val McDermid is an international number one bestselling Scottish crime writer best known for the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series and the Karen Pirie cold-case novels. Her books have sold more than 19 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. She has won both the CWA Gold Dagger and the CWA Diamond Dagger, while her two best-known series have been adapted for television.

Her writing career started with journalist Lindsay Gordon and Manchester private investigator Kate Brannigan. The Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels have a clinical psychologist working with the police on serial murder investigations, while Karen Pirie returns to cold cases that were abandoned or left unsolved years earlier. The Allie Burns books return once again to journalism and follow the same reporter after ten years.

This page lists all Val McDermid books in order, including her five crime series, Darkland Tales novellas, standalone novels, short story collections, anthologies, a graphic novel, a picture book, and non-fiction.

Latest Val McDermid Books

Lindsay Gordon Series (Books in Order)

The Lindsay Gordon series follows a lesbian Scottish journalist whose reporting repeatedly gets her involved in murder investigations. McDermid introduced Lindsay in Report for Murder in 1987, at a time when openly lesbian protagonists were still unusual in British crime fiction.

The books use Lindsay’s work and personal life together. For example, in Common Murder, she investigates a killing at a women’s peace camp where one of the main suspects in the death of a musician who was killed shortly before performing is her former lover. Later cases take her through newspapers, trade unions, publishing, and other parts of the world she knows through journalism.

The authord used her own newspaper career as inspiration when creating Lindsay and the people she meets through her work. Each mystery stands alone, but Lindsay’s career and relationships change across the six books, so publication order gives the fuller story.

1. Report for Murder, 1987
2. Common Murder, 1989
3. Final Edition, 1991 (also titled Open And Shut / Deadline for Murder)
4. Union Jack, 1993 (also titled Conferences are Murder)
5. Booked for Murder, 1996
6. Hostage to Murder, 2003

Kate Brannigan Series (Books in Order)

The Kate Brannigan series follows Manchester private investigator Kate Brannigan. In Dead Beat, a favour to her rock-journalist boyfriend sends her looking for a missing songwriter while she is also trying to find counterfeit luxury goods. Finding the woman leads Kate into her first murder investigation.

That pattern continues across the series. Kate usually starts with an ordinary job for a client, then finds that the problem is deeper than anyone admitted when they first hired her. She works without police authority, so she has to persuade people to talk and find evidence she can act on herself. The six cases mostly stand alone, although Kate’s agency and personal relationships continue from book to book. Star Struck, the final book, won France’s Grand Prix des Romans d’Aventure.

1. Dead Beat, 1992
2. Kick Back, 1993
3. Crack Down, 1994
4. Clean Break, 1995
5. Blue Genes, 1996
6. Star Struck, 1998

Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Series (Books in Order)

The Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series follows clinical psychologist and criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan in the fictional city of Bradfield. Tony tries to understand how an offender thinks, while Carol and her team have to turn his conclusions and findings into evidence they can use. They often work together to bring down serial killers, and the outcome of one case more than once changes how they work together in the next book.

The Mermaids Singing won the CWA Gold Dagger, and the characters became the basis of the television series Wire in the Blood. The main investigations can usually be followed on their own, but Tony and Carol’s careers and personal relationship develop throughout the eleven books.

1. The Mermaids Singing, 1995
2. The Wire in the Blood, 1997
3. The Last Temptation, 2002
4. The Torment of Others, 2004
5. Beneath the Bleeding, 2007
6. Fever Of The Bone, 2009
7. The Retribution, 2011
8. Cross and Burn, 2013
9. Splinter the Silence, 2015
10. Insidious Intent, 2017
11. How the Dead Speak, 2019

Karen Pirie Series (Books in Order)

The Karen Pirie series follows DCI Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, as she reopens old murder and disappearance cases after the original investigation has gone cold. Finding a new clue lets the team look at the case again, but it also makes witnesses and suspects repeat their old lies or defenses.

Karen works mainly from Fife and Edinburgh, although the investigations take her elsewhere in Scotland and beyond. Each book has its own case, while Karen’s team and her personal life change across the series. The Distant Echo remains the correct starting point even though the television adaptation gives Karen a larger role from the beginning.

1. The Distant Echo, 2003
2. A Darker Domain, 2008
3. The Skeleton Road, 2014
4. Out of Bounds, 2016
5. Broken Ground, 2018
6. Still Life, 2020
7. Past Lying, 2023
8. Silent Bones, 2025

Allie Burns Series (Books in Order)

The Allie Burns series follows Scottish newspaper reporter Allie Burns whose life is shown at ten-year intervals, beginning with 1979 and continuing with 1989. Allie starts in a Glasgow newsroom where women are still pushed towards softer assignments. So she has to find stories strong enough to make the editors take her seriously. The cases grow from the news, politics, and working conditions of each decade.

1999 is the next planned novel, but its publication date has not yet been officially confirmed.

1. 1979, 2021
2. 1989, 2022
3. 1999, TBA

Darkland Tales Books by Val McDermid

Darkland Tales is a multi-author series from Polygon in which Scottish writers return to events, people, myths, and legends from the country’s past. Each book tells a separate story, so the series can be read in any order.

Val McDermid has written two Darkland Tales. Rather than following Shakespeare’s version of Lady Macbeth, Queen Macbeth, the fifth book, gives Gruoch her own story. This Door of the Seas, the seventh book, is co-written with Geographer Royal for Scotland Jo Sharp. Through letters sent home from the expedition, it describes the failed Darien Scheme of the late seventeenth century.

1. Queen Macbeth, 2024
2. This Door of the Seas, 2026 (with Jo Sharp)

Standalone Novels

• A Place of Execution, 1999
• Killing the Shadows, 2000
• Naked Came the Phoenix, 2001
• The Grave Tattoo, 2006
• Trick Of The Dark, 2011
• The Vanishing Point, 2012
• Inherit the Dead, 2013
• Northanger Abbey, 2014 (Austen Project)

Novellas and Short Stories

• Cleanskin, 2006
• Life’s Too Short, 2010
• Footloose, 2018

Short Story Collections

• The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories, 1997
• Stranded, 2005
• Christmas is Murder, 2020

Short Story Anthologies

• 3rd Culprit, 1994
• Northern Blood 2, 1995
• Northern Blood 3: A Third Collection of Northern Crime Writing, 1998
• 12 Days: A Modern Twist on The Twelve Days of Christmas, 2000
• The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Third Annual Collection, 2002
• Crime in the City, 2002
• The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories Fourth Annual Collection, 2003
• Mysterious Pleasures, 2003
• Tart Noir, 2002
• Like a Charm, 2004
• The Adventure of the Missing Detective, 2005
• The Best New British Mysteries Volume II, 2005
• A Merry Band of Murderers, 2006
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries, 2008
• Criminal Tendencies, 2009
• The Sounds Of Crime, 2010 (audio anthology)
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7, 2010
• The Dark End of the Street, 2010
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9, 2012
• Crime Writers: A Decade of Crime, 2013, with Harlan Coben, Ann Cleeves, P D James, Mark Billingham, and Steve Mosby
• OxCrimes: 27 Killer Stories from the Cream of Crimewriters, 2014
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11, 2014
• Days of Wine and Roses, 2015
• Crime Plus Music, 2016
• Murder Under the Christmas Tree, 2016
• Deadlier, 2017
• Bloody Scotland, 2017
• Murder On Christmas Eve, 2017
• MatchUp, 2017 (edited by Lee Child)
• Exit Wounds, 2019
• Afraid of the Christmas Lights, 2020
• Marple: Twelve New Stories, 2022 ((published in the US as Marple: Twelve New Mysteries*)
• Ink and Daggers, 2023
• Murder in the Midday Sun: Classic Crime for the Holidays, 2026

Other Anthologies and Collaborative Collections

• Magnetic North: New Work from North East Writers, 2005
• Crime Scenes Revisited: Scottish Popular Fiction, 2006
• Airmail: Women of Letters, 2011
• The Library Book, 2012
• The Killer Cookbook, 2012
• Out There: An Anthology of Scottish LGBT Writing, 2014
• CrimeBits 2, 2025 (selected and introduced by Val McDermid)

Graphic Novels

• Resistance, 2020

Picture Books

• My Granny is a Pirate, 2012

Non-Fiction Books

• A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Private Eyes, 1995
• Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime, 2015
• My Scotland, 2019
• Imagine A Country, 2020 (with Jo Sharp)
• Winter: The Story of a Season, 2025

Val McDermid Biography

Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster whose work includes five crime series, standalone novels, short stories and novellas, non-fiction books, radio dramas, and a graphic novel.
Official website: valmcdermid.com

She was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in 1955 and spent much of her childhood with her grandparents in the mining village of East Wemyss. At seventeen, she entered St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she studied English and became the first student from a Scottish state school to attend the college.

After Oxford, she trained for two years as a journalist in Devon and was named Trainee Journalist of the Year. She then worked for fourteen years on national newspapers in Glasgow and Manchester, eventually becoming Northern Bureau Chief of a Sunday tabloid. That experience later gave her the newsroom background which she used in the Lindsay Gordon and Allie Burns novels, as both main characters as journalists as well.

McDermid was already trying to write while working as a journalist. Her first completed novel was rejected, but an actor friend thought it could work as a play. She rewrote it as Like a Happy Ending, which was produced by the Plymouth Theatre Company when she was twenty-three. She later adapted the play for BBC radio.

She began Report for Murder in 1984 after reading American women crime writers who had female investigators as main protagonists in their books. The Women’s Press published the novel in 1987, introducing journalist Lindsay Gordon. Val McDermid left newspaper work in April 1991 and has written books full time since then. Kate Brannigan followed in 1992, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan in 1995, Karen Pirie in 2003, and Allie Burns in 2021.

The Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels became her best-known series and were adapted for television as Wire in the Blood. Karen Pirie later became a second television series. She has also written for radio and theatre, created the original idea for the television drama Traces, and adapted her Radio 4 drama Resistance as a graphic novel.

Val McDermid co-founded the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in 2003. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, and Professor of Scottish Studies and Crime Fiction at the University of Otago. She married Professor Jo Sharp, the Geographer Royal for Scotland, in 2016. Together, they co-edited Imagine a Country in 2020 and they co-wrote This Door of the Seas, a historical novella about the failed Darien Scheme, which was published in 2026. They divide their time between Edinburgh and the East Neuk of Fife.

Val McDermid Book Adaptations

• Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series – adapted into the television series Wire in the Blood (2002–2008)
• A Place of Execution – adapted into the television miniseries A Place of Execution (2008
• Karen Pirie series – adapted into the television series Karen Pirie (2022)

Val McDermid Awards and Honors

Major Awards

• The Mermaids Singing – CWA Gold Dagger (1995)
• A Place of Execution – Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller (2000)
• The Torment of Others – Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (2006)
• CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger (2010)Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award (2011)
• Forensics – Anthony Award for Best Critical or Non-Fiction Work (2016)
• Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award (2016)
• DIVA Literary Prize for Crime (2017)
• Radio Bremen Crime Prize (2024)
• DIVA Writer of the Year (2025)

Awards (Full List)

Nominations and Shortlists

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