Author Information
Val McDermid's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    48 Books (5 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1987
  • Latest Book:
    November 2023
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About the Author

Val Mcdermid was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland on 4th june 1955 and she is a crime fiction writer. After graduating from St Hilda's College Oxford she became a journalist, and worked briefly as a dramatist. Her first success as a novelist did not appear until 1987. Her novels, in particular the Tony Hill series, are known for their graphic depictions of violence and torture.

Full Series List in Order

Allie Burns

1 - 1979 (Oct-2021)
2 - 1989 (Oct-2022)

Karen Pirie

1 - The Distant Echo (Oct-2003)
2 - A Darker Domain (Feb-2009)
3 - The Skeleton Road (Dec-2014)
4 - Out of Bounds (Dec-2016)
5 - Broken Ground (Dec-2018)
6 - Still Life (Oct-2020)
7 - Past Lying (Nov-2023)

A Kate Brannigan Mystery

1 - Dead Beat (Apr-1993)
2 - Kick Back (Sep-1993)
3 - Crack Down (Nov-1994)
4 - Clean Break (Oct-1995)
5 - Blue Genes (1996)
6 - Star Struck (1998)

A Lindsay Gordon Mystery

1 - Report for Murder (1987)
2 - Common Murder (1989)
3 - Open and Shut // Final Edition (Apr-1991)
4 - Conferences Are Murder // Union Jack (1993)
5 - Booked for Murder (1996)
6 - Hostage to Murder (Nov-2003)
7 - Deadline for Murder (Sep-2005)

Tony Hill & Carol Jordan

1 - The Mermaids Singing (1995)
2 - The Wire in the Blood (Sep-1998)
3 - The Last Temptation (Sep-2002)
4 - The Torment of Others (Jun-2004)
5 - Beneath the Bleeding (Mar-2008)
6 - Fever of the Bone (Sep-2010)
7 - The Retribution (Jan-2012)
8 - Cross and Burn (Oct-2013)
9 - Splinter the Silence (Dec-2015)
10 - Insidious Intent (Dec-2017)
11 - How The Dead Speak (Dec-2019)

Multi-Author Series List

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey (Apr-2014)

Book List in Order: 48 titles



    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy

    In one volume, the first two mysteries featuring a journalist who investigates murder, from the Diamond Dagger winner known as “Britain’s Queen of Crime” (The Times).   From the Edgar Award-nominated author of the DCI Karen Pirie series, t...



    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy

    Lindsay Gordon, Scottish journalist and amateur sleuth, was the first creation of international bestseller Val McDermid. Report for Murder introduced the United Kingdom’s first lesbian detective, and the series has been perennially popular ever ...



  • Two mysteries in one volume featuring the investigating journalist, from the Diamond Dagger Award-winning author.Final Edition When Alison Maxwell, a well-known Glaswegian journalist with an irresistible sexual attraction to both sexes, is found murd...



    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy

    Lindsay Gordon, Scottish journalist and amateur sleuth, was the first creation of international bestseller Val McDermid. Report for Murder introduced the United Kingdom’s first lesbian detective, and the series has been perennially popular ever ...



  • Dead Beat introduces Kate Brannigan, a female private detective set to do for Manchester what V. I. Warshawski has done for Chicago. As a favour, Kate agrees to track down a missing song writer Moira Pollock, a search that takes her into some of the ...



  • Fresh from her dazzling debut in Dead Beat, Manchester P.I. Kate Brannigan finds herself in search of some concrete evidence on a couple of dirty developers. The savvy and down-to-earth detective is reluctant to take on her secretary's new heartthrob...



  • Kate Brannigan has seen her share of foul play on the job, even though her Manchester investigation firm handles mostly white collar crime. But when she and her boyfriend Richard, a rock music critic, go undercover to get the goods on a car dealershi...



    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy

    THE PERFECT CRIMINAL Another body has been found. The fourth. Now even the most reluctant members of the Bradfield police department have to admit they have a serial killer on their hands. A sicko. All the victims have been young men, their naked ...



  • TRACKING A MASTERPIECE, TRAPPING A KILLER When a precious Monet painting is nicked from a posh British estate where Kate Brannigan arranged the security, the tough-talking PI is right on the job to get it back. For Kate, whose sources extend from Ma...






    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy


    “A fast-paced joyride that swoops and curves past (or right over) the villains with barely a pause . . . readers will happily keep up, even if it leaves them a little breathless.” -- Publishers Weekly


    Kate Brannigan is having a b...



    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy

    The fifth and sixth novels starring the self-proclaimed “cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist” from the internationally bestselling crime writer.   “The macho world of the whodunit has never seen a sleuth like Lindsay Gordon” a...



  • Crime in all its devious incarnations is presented in this treat of murderous morsels dished out by old ppros and promising newcomers. Artfully crafted and impossible to put down, each story bountifully demooonstrates why these authors are la creme d...



    • / Private Investigator
    • Buy Buy


    “There is no one in contemporary crime fiction who has managed to combine the visceral and the humane as well as Val McDermid. . . . She’s the best.” -- The New York Times Book Review


    “McDermid has a sharp ear for the dialo...



  • COMMITTING MURDER IS LIKE MAGIC. THE SLEIGHT OF HAND...THE DECEPTION OF THE EYE. Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job o...



  • Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezlng day in December, another child goes missing: thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her ...



  • A CUNNING KILLER A killer is on the loose, blurring the line between fact and fiction. His prey--writers of bestselling crime novels--are unaware that they have scripted their own murders, for this diabolical killer reenacts the most chilling scenes...



  • Coming to terms over her breakup with criminal profiler Dr. Tony Hill, Chief Inspector Carol Jordan plunges into a risky undercover sting: track down a European drug trafficker and gain his confidence. But she's being tracked as well-by a serial kill...



  • 'Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool. A clever fool -- perhaps -- but a fool just the same' RAYMOND CHANDLER Ever since its creation in 1953, the Crime Writers' Association has celebrated and champione...



  • It was a winter morning in 1978, that the body of a young barmaid was discovered in the snow banks of a Scottish cemetery. The only suspects in her brutal murder were the four young men who found her: Alex Gilbey and his three best friends. With no e...






  • Jobless in Glasgow, Lindsay Gordon makes friends with a young freelance journalist Rory McLaren. But when a local car-dealer's stepson is kidnapped, Lindsay and Rory are invited to trade journalism for detection. The trail leads them to St Petersburg...



  • Dr. Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan return in the award-winning series that is the basis for the hit show on BBC America. In a small grim room, the body of a woman is discovered, panic and pain etched in her face. The scene ma...



  • Lindsay Gordon, Scottish journalist and amateur sleuth, was the first creation of international bestseller Val McDermid. Report for Murder introduced the United Kingdom’s first lesbian detective, and the series has been perennially popular ever ...



  • A must-read collection of stories by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, “one of the bright lights of the mystery field” (The Washington Post).   Val McDermid’s novels have won the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award and the Crime Wri...



  • From bestselling author Val McDermid comes a modern thriller about an ancient murder set on the high seas... After summer rains uncover a corpse bearing tattoos like those of eighteenth- century seafarers, many residents of the English Lake Distri...



  • The New York Times Book Review raves about author Val McDermid, calling her “as smooth a practitioner of crime fiction as anyone out there. She’s the best we’ve got.” Her newest thriller, Beneath the Bleeding, once again proves it to be so. W...





  • Past and present intertwine in this rare stand-alone novel of taut psychological drama--a brilliant exploration of loyalty and greed from the bestselling mistress of suspense. Fife, Scotland, 1985. Heiress Catriona Maclennan Grant and her baby so...



  • He is psychologist and criminal profiler Dr. Tony Hill's worst nightmare -- a killer driven by the most perverted hungers and unmoved by youth and innocence, a killer with a long shopping list of victims who leaves no trail. The murder-mutilation of ...



  • "Val McDermid is one of the bright lights of the mystery field." -- The Washington Post

    "She's the best we've got." -- The New York Times Book Review

    Barred from practice, disgraced psychiatrist Charlie Flint receives a mysterious su...






  • Tony Hill has had a good run. He and detective Carol Jordan have put away scores of dangerous criminals at a rate that colleagues envy. But there is one serial killer who has shaped and defined their careers, and whose evil surpasses all others: Jack...



  • My granny is a pirate!
    She's sailed the seven seas.
    She captured many pirate ships
    But was always home for tea.
    When a family secret about Granny is revealed, we discover all about her fiercesome pirate reputation and her swashbuckling...



  • One of the finest crime writers we have, Val McDermid’s heart-stopping thrillers have won her international renown and a devoted following of readers worldwide. In The Vanishing Point, she kicks off a terrifying thriller with a nightmare scenario: ...



  • Val McDermid’s Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novels are thrillers at their best--unbearably suspenseful, psychologically complex, expertly plotted and impossible to predict--and they have riveted millions worldwide. As Cross and Burn opens, Tony and C...



  • Internationally best-selling crime writer Val McDermid has riveted millions of readers worldwide with her acutely suspenseful, psychologically complex, seamlessly plotted thrillers. In Northanger Abbey, she delivers her own, witty, updated take on Au...



  • The Skeleton Road is a gripping standalone novel about a cold case that links back to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. In the center of historic Edinburgh, builders are preparing to demolish a disused Victorian Gothic building. They are understandably s...



  • Psychologist Tony Hill and former police detective Carol Jordan are back in SPLINTER THE SILENCE -- a masterful, compulsive read centered on the mysterious deaths of several women who were the victims of vicious cyberbullying. Is it violence if it’...



  • A riveting cold case novel featuring detective Karen Pirie When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before. Finding the answer to the co...



  • In the north of England, single women are beginning to disappear from weddings. A wedding crasher is luring the women away―only to torch the victims’ bodies in their own cars in remote locations, leaving behind no personal clues or forensic trace...



  • Internationally bestselling author Val McDermid is one of our finest crime writers, and her gripping, masterfully plotted novels have garnered millions of readers from around the globe. In BROKEN GROUND, cold case detective Karen Pirie faces her hard...






  • He was a clinical psychologist who specialized in unraveling the motivations of the twisted killers who wanted to express themselves again and again. She was the kind of detective for whom justice matters more than any other consideration… In th...



  • The latest in internationally bestselling crime writer Val McDermid’s beloved series, How The Dead Speak reunites Tony Hill and Carol Jordan after a mysterious skeleton turns up on the grounds of an old orphanage Val McDermid is an award-winning, ...



  • Val McDermid is the award-winning, international bestselling author of more than thirty novels and has been hailed as Britain’s Queen of Crime. In Still Life, McDermid returns to her propulsive series featuring DCI Karen Pirie, who finds herself in...





  • A mysterious illness appears in Scotland while a reporter searches for the truth in this graphic novel by the bestselling author of the Karen Pirie series. The first graphic novel from Britain’s “Queen of Crime” (Scotsman) and gorgeously illust...



  • A Scottish journalist is drawn into a world of corruption, terror, and murder in the new novel by “one of crime fiction’s most eminent writers” (Entertainment Weekly).   The year started badly and only got worse -- blizzards, strikes, powe...





  • In the new installment to her historical crime series that began with 1979, internationally bestselling author Val McDermid delivers a propulsive new thriller that finds journalist Allie Burns has become an editor, and as the Cold War and AIDS crisis...



  • In this superb new addition to Val McDermid’s masterful crime series, DCI Karen Pirie returns in a propulsive thriller of deceit and vengeance, set against the disquiet of a global pandemicBritain’s reigning “Queen of Crime” (The Scotsman), V...


Award-Winning Books by Val McDermid

A Darker Domain
2009 RT Reviewers Choice Award -- P.I./Procedural Novel
Fever of the Bone
2010 Lambda Literary Award -- Lesbian Mystery
2011 Lambda Literary Award -- Lesbian Mystery
A Place of Execution
2001 Anthony Award -- Novel
2001 Dilys Award -- Mystery Novel
2001 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Val McDermid has published 48 books.

Val McDermid does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Past Lying, was published in November 2023.

The first book by Val McDermid, Report for Murder, was published in January 1987.

Yes. Val McDermid has 5 series.