Start with A Place of Execution. It is a standalone, so it commits you to nothing; it is the book most often named her best; and it is far less brutal than the series she is best known for, which means it tells you whether you like her writing rather than letting the content make that decision for you. A girl vanishes from a Derbyshire hamlet in 1963, a young inspector works a case in a village that closes around him, and a journalist reopens it thirty-five years later. The last hundred pages do something structural that is worth meeting cold.
If you specifically want to begin a series rather than read one book, start with The Mermaids Singing instead and read on from there. But be clear about what you are getting, because this is the part a bookshop shelf cannot tell you: McDermid has written five distinct strands under one name, they look identical on the spine, and picking up the wrong one is how people end up sixty pages into book four of something.
Strand one: Tony Hill and Carol Jordan
The famous one, and the basis for the television series Wire in the Blood. Tony Hill is a clinical psychologist who profiles offenders; Carol Jordan is the detective he works alongside. It begins with The Mermaids Singing, which won the Gold Dagger in 1995, and continues with The Wire in the Blood, then The Last Temptation, The Torment of Others, Beneath the Bleeding, Fever of the Bone and on through several more that are not in our catalogue.
Two warnings, both plain. These books contain graphic violence, including detailed torture and sexual violence, described rather than implied — it is a defining feature of the series and not something you can skim past. And the relationship between the two leads runs as a serial across every volume, so this is the one strand where reading in publication order genuinely matters. Start anywhere else in it and the emotional through-line is spoiled.
Strand two: Karen Pirie
Cold cases, Scotland, a detective who reopens files nobody wants reopened. It begins with The distant echo, in which four students find a dying woman in the snow in 1978 St Andrews and are never quite cleared of it, and the case comes back twenty-five years later with new forensic technology. Worth knowing: Karen Pirie is a secondary character in this first book, so it reads much more like a standalone than a series opener. The strand is considerably less graphic than the Tony Hill novels and more interested in procedure, memory and the passage of time. It has also been adapted for television, which is why the name may be familiar.
Strand three: Lindsay Gordon
Where she started, in 1987, with Report for Murder. Lindsay Gordon is a Scottish lesbian journalist who keeps finding bodies; there are six books. They are lighter, shorter and openly of their moment, and the 1980s setting is now period detail rather than contemporary. Read them if you are interested in how the writer began, or if you want crime fiction with a heroine who was genuinely unusual in mainstream publishing at the time. They are not where a new reader should start.
Strand four: the standalones
A Place of Execution is the one to read. Others outside our catalogue include Killing the Shadows, The Grave Tattoo and The Vanishing Point. These are where she takes the most structural risks, and each one is self-contained.
Strand five: Allie Burns
The newest sequence, opening with the novel titled 1979 and following a young journalist in Glasgow through the events of that year, with a sequel set a decade later. It is closer to a newspaper novel than a police procedural, and it stands apart from everything above.
There is also a sixth strand, the Kate Brannigan private-eye novels set in Manchester, which are not in our catalogue.
How to tell them apart on the shelf
There is no numbering and no unifying cover design, so the only reliable method is the lead character. Tony Hill or Carol Jordan on the back cover means the graphic strand. Karen Pirie means cold cases. Lindsay Gordon means the 1980s. Allie Burns means the newspaper novels. Anything else is probably a standalone and safe to read on its own.
Follow the full ordered path here: Val McDermid books in order: where to start with Tony Hill and the standalones.
