Below is the complete list of Val McDermid books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Allie Burns Books
Publication Order of Inspector Karen Pirie Books
Publication Order of Kate Brannigan Books
Publication Order of Lindsay Gordon Books
Publication Order of Tony Hill/Carol Jordan Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Short Story Collections Books
Publication Order of Graphic Novels Books
Publication Order of Picture Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of Austen Project Books
Publication Order of The MatchUp Collection Books
Publication Order of Vintage Murders Books
Publication Order of Darkland Tales Books
- Queen Macbeth (2024)
Queen Macbeth was first published in 2024; within the Darkland Tales series, it is listed as book #5. 
About Val McDermid
Val McDermid is a Scottish crime novelist whose work has helped define contemporary British crime fiction across more than four decades. From investigative journalists and private detectives to criminal psychologists and cold-case specialists, her recurring protagonists approach violence from sharply different perspectives, allowing her to explore policing, forensic psychology, journalism, gender, class, sexuality, and institutional power. Her books have sold more than 19 million copies worldwide and appeared in over forty languages, while several of her series have made successful transitions to television.
Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, McDermid grew up within the Scottish mining community and spent considerable time with her grandparents in East Wemyss. At seventeen she entered St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to study English, becoming the first student from a Scottish state school admitted there. Although she had wanted to write from childhood, she initially pursued journalism as the more practical profession. After training in Devon, she spent fourteen years working on national newspapers in Glasgow and Manchester, eventually becoming Northern Bureau Chief of a Sunday tabloid.
Crime fiction gradually became her route away from journalism. Inspired partly by the emergence of American women crime writers, McDermid began Report for Murder in 1984. Published in 1987, it introduced journalist Lindsay Gordon, an openly lesbian investigator whose cases combined murder with workplace politics, feminism, relationships, and contemporary social issues. McDermid left full-time journalism in 1991 and has supported herself primarily through writing ever since.
A second series introduced Manchester private investigator Kate Brannigan, whose six novels beginning with Dead Beat brought a faster, more traditionally hard-boiled energy to cases involving fraud, organized crime, business, and murder. McDermid then moved into significantly darker psychological territory with The Mermaids Singing, the first collaboration between criminal psychologist Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan. The novel won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and the eleven-book sequence later inspired the television drama Wire in the Blood.
Cold-case investigator Karen Pirie became another major strand of McDermid’s career. Beginning with The Distant Echo, the series examines crimes whose original investigations have stalled but whose consequences continue for victims, suspects, and their families years later. Karen’s combination of persistence, skepticism, and attention to neglected evidence has sustained the series through Silent Bones, its eighth novel, published in 2025. The books have also been adapted into the ITV television series Karen Pirie.
McDermid returned to journalism from a fictional perspective with the Allie Burns series. Beginning with 1979 and continuing with 1989, it follows a young Scottish reporter through successive decades, combining investigative crime with political and social change. Her standalone fiction is equally substantial, including A Place of Execution, Killing the Shadows, The Vanishing Point, and The Skeleton Road, alongside historical reinterpretations such as Northanger Abbey and Queen Macbeth. She has also written nonfiction, most notably Forensics, which explores the scientific disciplines used to investigate crime.
Her work has earned the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award, and numerous other honors. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Royal Society of Edinburgh and helped establish the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.
McDermid’s bibliography is unusually varied without losing its recognizable character. Whether she is writing psychological suspense, police procedural, historical fiction, or investigative journalism, she is less interested in crime as an isolated act than in the environment that makes it possible. Families, professions, institutions, prejudices, and old loyalties surround every investigation, ensuring that uncovering who committed a crime is rarely the same thing as understanding why it happened.