Scottish Thrillers

The most hated man in the most dour town in Scotland is sleeping with the fishes, or more accurately, has been dumped into a tank filled with crustaceans. All that remains of the murdered victim are his bones. But once the lobsters have been shipped off to Britain's best restaurants, the whole affair quickly lands on the plate of Constable Hamish Macbeth.

The only thing you can't escape, is your own fear. DCI Dani Bevan is seconded to Edinburgh to head the inquiry into a high ranking cop suspected of corruption. The case appears clear-cut until a key player is murdered in a remote car-park on the Longniddry Bents. Bevan is drawn into a complex murder case which ties together her personal and professional life like no other she's investigated in the past. To get to the truth, they must face their darkest fears...

A phone call from Belfast shatters Isobel McKenzie’s sleep and her peace. Her nephew, Jack, is safe but two of his friends from Queen’s University are not. Michael is dead and Charlene is in a coma. Isobel leaves for Belfast immediately. The PSNI suspect theft as the motive for the crime but, as Isobel and Jack investigate, they uncover other possible motives: an online bully, a drug connection and ultimately a web of organised crime. A cross-border drug task force is set up and, amidst politics and talk of corruption, the case becomes more and more complicated. Help arrives from London...

A simple case of a missing sister. Or is it? When Ian Skair is invited to an ancient castle perched on a rocky promontory of the Angus coast, he expects to find a routine missing person case. Little does he know, the Laird of Drumlychtoun and his family have more secrets and black sheep than Ian could have ever anticipated. As Ian uncovers secrets and intrigues, thefts and legends, he finds himself and the family in a dangerous situation. Can he reunite the laird with his sister and discover the truth behind her disappearance? Or will the family's secrets be too much for them to handle?

How long would you wait to take revenge? 'Now,’ Granny said quietly. ‘We shall hold hands in the dark. Then we will know we aren’t on our own.’ When Sergeant Sam Sharpe of the Virginia P.D. contacts Dani Bevan about the murder of one of his officers, the Glasgow DCI doesn’t see how she can help. But as Sam explains further, Dani finds herself entangled in a case which transports her team back to the murky world of the industrial conflicts of the 1970s. Hold Hands in the Dark is the seventh novel in the DCI Dani Bevan series of police procedurals.

Abi Logan and her partner, Grant MacEwan, are looking forward to a romantic weekend on a remote island off the coast of Scotland until the ghost of a 15th-century monk appears on the scene, leaving a trail of victims in his wake. The Scottish call this kind of apparition eldritch–weird, ghostly, and sinister. Abi couldn’t agree more, though, unlike the locals, she’s sure this is no spirit of the dead, but a real live person who seems to have a very earthly grudge against Abi, Grant, and their whisky-making host, Neil.

In The Lewis Man, the second book of the trilogy, Fin Macleod has returned to the Isle of Lewis, the storm-tossed, wind-scoured outer Hebridean island where he was born and raised. Having left behind his adult life in Edinburgh - including his wife and his career in the police force - the former Detective Inspector is intent on repairing past relationships and restoring his parents' derelict cottage. His plans are interrupted when an unidentified corpse is recovered from a Lewis peat bog. The only clue to its identity is a DNA match to a local farmer, the now-senile Tormod Macdonald....

One winter's night, bookseller Delaney Nichols and her coworker Hamlet are invited to a Burns Night dinner, a traditional Scottish celebration of the poet Robert Burns. She's perplexed by the invitation, but intrigued. The dinner takes place at Burns House itself, a tiny cottage not far from the Cracked Spine bookshop but well hidden. There, it becomes clear that Delaney and Hamlet were summoned in an attempt to make amends between Edwin, Delaney's boss, and one of the other invitees, who suspected Edwin for burning down his own bookshop.

When DCI Duncan Bone is contacted by a terminally-ill psychiatric patient and given clues linking a forty-year-old unsolved murder to high-profile public figures, he finds himself locked into a conspiracy at the very heart of the Scottish criminal and political establishment. With his bosses stonewalling the investigation, lives under threat, and his career on the line, Bone faces a race against time to hunt down a group of men who will stop at nothing to cover their murderous crime.

Scotland has a dead body problem. Another one. And in the wake of a similar spate of tribute killings, Special Agents Luke Kendrick and Carly MacDonald know they have their work cut out for them. Working alongside a new team of agents, the partners have more questions than answers when the crime scenes yield little evidence. In the style of infamous killers Burke and Hare, it appears victims are being moved to a secondary location, where they’re dissected and sold for spare parts.

Isle of Iona, 1927: Cast away on a remote locale, Jane’s latest assignment depends on concealing her identity and blending in at an occult gathering. Not even her fiancé, Redvers, can be too close as she uncovers the truth about Robert Nightingale, enigmatic leader of the Order of the Golden Dawn—a group made up of supernatural ceremonies, influential people, and an undefinable darkness. When a woman tries to escape to the mainland only to be found murdered in the moors, the shocking scene reveals it’s easier to join the Golden Dawn than it is to leave.

The aromas of wild thyme and Highland heather waft through Lochdubh, home to M. C. Beaton's eccentric policeman, Hamish Macbeth. Yet what the irascible constable smells in his latest case is the acrid scent of fear as an entire town is entrapped in something dark and deadly.... Yet as he deftly investigates the summer's high crimes and misdemeanors, he attracts the attention of his superiors. They feel a promotion and transfer will give him a larger playing field than Lochdubh. That's the last thing Macbeth wants.

The Isle of Ghiant has had no permanent inhabitants since the early 1960s, so when a fisherman discovers the freshly dumped body of a woman there, the case baffles the detective in charge. The body is identified as that of a high-ranking ex-cop. The pressure to solve the case intensifies. DCI Dani Bevan knew the victim. DI Juliet Lowther was her first boss as a young detective, starting out her career in Glasgow. The case requires Dani to re-evaluate her past, as a catalogue of shocking secrets emerge that will change the way she views everything that went before. The Dark Isle is the tenth...

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs are on the warpath in the village of Balfour, and the local shop owners fear that their financial sins are about to catch up with them. Meanwhile, Abbey Glen’s new Whisky Masterclass is a resounding success...until the latest group of students starts to drop dead in the night and Abi Logan fears that what they are really offering is a Masterclass in Murder. Missing money, dead bodies, and a whistle blower who may not be as virtuous as he appears leave Abi scrambling for clues in the dark. Will Abi find the killer before the inevitable happens?

The disappearance of a three-year-old girl from her isolated Highland home one summer shook the nation. A massive police search involving divers in the loch and dogs combing the moorland and mountains had failed to find Lily Masterton. Three years later, the world may have forgotten the blond-haired girl with the big blue eyes, but her grief-stricken parents hire Private Investigator Teàrlach Paterson—an expert in finding missing children—to bring their precious Lily home. But this is no ordinary family struck by tragedy.

* Newly Edited Version (Sept 2014) * Two women are dead, forty years apart and in identical circumstances. Can Imogen and Hugh Croft discover the link? Following the sudden death of her mother, Imogen Croft returns to her childhood home on the Scottish Island of Garansay. Her brothers have given her the task of deciding what to do with their parents’ farm, which is slowly falling into disrepair. Imogen will not be rushed into passing judgement on the place. When she starts to carry out some research into the history of Kilduggan Farm, she inadvertently sets off a chain of events that ends...

Glasgow is hosting the international climate conference, COP26. Police resources are stretched to their limit. When a delegate is found murdered in his hotel room in a bizarrely staged tableau, DCI Dani Bevan and her team must lead a discreet investigation that won't de-rail the conference but prevents a dangerous killer from striking once again... Bevan has been granted greater resources than for any previous investigation, as the top politicians in the land want the case solved ASAP. But Dani’s murder team are taken far-afield in their search for evidence and the answers they uncover ...

When a small bone at the centre of a famous sculpture is revealed to be human, three people become intimately connected by the secrets and lies that put it there. Set on a Scottish tidal island connected to the mainland for just a few hours each day, and home to only one inhabitant, The Blue Hour asks questions of ambition, power, art and perception.

Holly Fenwick thought she had left her nightmare behind. Twelve years ago, she narrowly escaped the clutches of a brutal serial killer. Now, while she films a documentary in Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders, to recover from her ordeal and rebuild her life, she spots a figure eerily similar to her former captor. She rushes in, only to find no trace of the man but a chaotic crime scene–and a missing woman.

“Harald's Gold is Jack Dancer at his most unhinged and entertaining.” Michele Klawitter’s Review For Amazon. What’s it all about? Our tale kicks off with Billie Skye, a no-nonsense doc, watching a Nigerian kid take a bullet and shrug it off like it's a mosquito bite. Yeah, you heard right—bulletproof skin. And that’s just the opening act in this carnival of chaos. Fast forward a few years, and Billie’s got a Hausa warrior hot on her heels, sent by Nigeria's whackjob Prez for life, Big Johnson Mambo-Sambo. He’s got Billie mixed up with her mercenary-for-hire twin brother ...