Jack Parlabane Series Books in Order

The Jack Parlabane Series is a Scottish crime thriller franchise written by Christopher Brookmyre (also published as Chris Brookmyre), featuring one of crime fiction's most entertainingly anarchic investigative journalists. Jack Parlabane is a Scottish investigative journalist whose career repeatedly intersects with murder, conspiracy, and political corruption — partly because he actively pursues stories in dangerous places, and partly because he has a talent for being in the wrong place at the most interesting possible moment. He is funny, irreverent, politically radical, and possessed of exactly the kind of reckless courage that makes excellent investigative journalism and extremely poor personal risk management.

Brookmyre writes with a sharp, satirical intelligence that sets his books apart from the average crime thriller. His targets include Scottish and British political corruption, religious hypocrisy, media manipulation, and the self-serving pretensions of various institutions, and he skewers them with a wit that owes as much to political comedy as to crime fiction. The plots are intricate and frequently absurdist — Brookmyre is not afraid of taking his stories in very dark directions while maintaining a fundamentally comic tone — and the Glasgow and Edinburgh settings are rendered with insider familiarity.

Spanning 7 novels published from 1996 to 2021, with a significant gap in the middle of Parlabane's publication history as Brookmyre wrote other series, the books are best read in order for the development of Jack's personal life and the evolution of his career. Begin with Quite Ugly One Morning (1996) — the debut establishes the character's voice and tone immediately and remains one of the most purely entertaining first novels in British crime fiction.