Below is the complete list of Val McDermid’s Allie Burns books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Allie Burns Books
About Allie Burns
Val McDermid’s Allie Burns series follows a Scottish journalist across successive decades, using investigations into crime and corruption to chart both her changing career and a Britain undergoing profound political, social, and technological transformation. The published sequence begins with 1979 and continues with 1989, each novel placing Allie inside a year whose headlines help shape the fictional story. McDermid conceived the project as a broader decade-by-decade chronicle, and as of 2026 she is working on 1999, the third installment.
When readers meet Allie in 1979, she is an ambitious young reporter working in a Scottish newsroom still dominated by men. She wants the kind of investigation that will prove she belongs beyond routine assignments, and fellow journalist Danny Sullivan becomes both colleague and ally. Their reporting leads them into a financial scheme involving respectable businessmen and then toward something considerably more dangerous: a home-grown terrorist organization that Allie attempts to infiltrate.
The period setting is fundamental to the novel. Britain is entering the Winter of Discontent, newspapers are produced through technologies that now seem remote, and reporters cannot fall back on mobile phones, internet searches, or searchable digital records. Information depends upon contacts, paper files, telephone calls, physical surveillance, and persuading people to talk. McDermid, who worked as a journalist herself during this era, uses the newsroom without nostalgia, particularly in her depiction of sexism and the obstacles facing women who wanted serious reporting careers.
1989 finds Allie a decade older and considerably more established. She is running the northern news operation of the Sunday Globe, but professional advancement has carried her away from some of the investigative work that originally attracted her to journalism. The newspaper business itself is changing around her, with tabloid culture becoming increasingly aggressive and technological disruption beginning to reshape how stories are gathered and presented.
The year supplies an unusually dense historical background. The aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing remains raw, the AIDS crisis is devastating communities while misinformation and prejudice shape public discussion, and political change is accelerating across Eastern Europe as the Cold War approaches its end. Allie becomes drawn into a story concerning the treatment of people with HIV and AIDS, while questionable medical research and murder push her back toward the kind of investigation she had feared her editorial career was leaving behind.
Allie’s personal life also changes significantly between the novels. McDermid does not keep her protagonist suspended at one stage of adulthood simply because she belongs to a crime series. Relationships, professional ambitions, political attitudes, and expectations about what a woman can openly be all evolve as the decades move forward.
That long perspective is the distinguishing idea behind the series. Allie is both investigator and witness, positioned inside a profession responsible for turning current events into the first draft of history. McDermid can therefore revisit major events without treating them as detached historical milestones. Their meaning emerges through newsroom decisions, prejudice, personal risk, and what journalists could or could not establish at the time.
With 1999 now in development, the project remains unfinished. What already makes Allie Burns distinctive, however, is the scale of McDermid’s ambition: not merely to give one reporter a succession of crimes to investigate, but to let her age alongside the society she reports on, showing how journalism, Britain, and Allie herself are altered by each passing decade.