Below is the complete list of Graeme Macrae Burnet books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Inspector Gorski Investigation Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of Darkland Tales Books
- Queen Macbeth (2024)
(By Val McDermid)
Queen Macbeth was first published in 2024; within the Darkland Tales series, it is listed as book #5. 
About Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet is a Scottish novelist whose work occupies an unusual territory between literary fiction, crime, historical narrative, psychological study, and elaborate metafiction. Rather than simply telling readers a story, he often constructs fictional documents, translations, memoirs, case files, and biographies that appear to have been discovered rather than invented. That technique has made questions of identity, authorship, memory, and unreliable evidence central to his work, most notably in the Booker Prize-shortlisted His Bloody Project and the Booker-longlisted Case Study.
Born in Kilmarnock in 1967 and now based in Glasgow, Burnet studied film and English literature before working in television and teaching abroad. He wrote for years before gaining significant recognition through a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013. His first published novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, appeared the following year and introduced Georges Gorski, a police chief in the French town of Saint-Louis.
That book also introduced one of Burnet’s favorite literary games. It is presented as though Burnet were merely translating a novel by the fictional French writer Raymond Brunet. Gorski returned in The Accident on the A35 and A Case of Matricide, completing a trilogy influenced by the psychologically restrained crime fiction associated with Georges Simenon. The invented author and translator framework grows increasingly important across the sequence, blurring the distinction between Burnet’s real biography and the fictional history surrounding Brunet.
Burnet achieved international recognition with His Bloody Project. Set in a nineteenth-century Highland crofting community, the novel concerns seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae, who admits killing three people. Instead of presenting the case through a conventional narrative, Burnet assembles a supposed archive of memoir, witness statements, medical reports, trial material, and other documents. The form makes the reader repeatedly reconsider what can be trusted, even when the basic fact of the killings is never seriously disputed. The novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize and won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award.
Case Study applies similar uncertainty to 1960s psychotherapy. A young woman adopts the identity “Rebecca” while investigating controversial therapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she suspects of contributing to her sister’s death. Her notebooks alternate with an apparently researched biography of Braithwaite, who is himself fictional but placed among genuine figures and cultural events. The result continually unsettles the distinction between biography and invention, while examining whether identity is something stable or something constructed through performance. The novel was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Burnet returned to nineteenth-century Scottish violence with Benbecula, published in 2025 as part of Polygon’s Darkland Tales series. Unlike the fictional crime behind His Bloody Project, the novella draws upon the real 1857 Benbecula murders committed by Angus MacPhee and imagines the events through his brother Malcolm. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Burnet’s bibliography remains relatively compact, but its recurring concerns are unusually distinctive. Murder may provide the structure, yet his deeper interest lies in how stories acquire authority. Confessions can mislead, biographies can invent, translators can conceal themselves, and documents can appear objective while guiding readers toward conclusions. His fiction repeatedly turns the act of reading into part of the mystery, asking not merely what happened, but why a particular version of what happened should be believed.