Logan McRae Series Books in Order

The Logan McRae Series by Stuart MacBride is set in Aberdeen, Scotland — a city MacBride renders with grim affection: perpetually cold, perpetually wet, and full of crime that ranges from the banal to the deeply disturbing. DS Logan McRae is the reluctant protagonist of these darkly comic police procedurals, a detective perpetually caught between his own good instincts and the institutional chaos that surrounds him.

MacBride is a genuine original in crime fiction. His books are simultaneously very funny and very dark — sometimes within the same paragraph. The humor is never cheap; it emerges naturally from the absurdity of police bureaucracy, the eccentricity of Aberdeen's criminal class, and Logan's long-suffering attempts to do his job properly amid constant interference.

The series launched in 2005 with Cold Granite, which introduced Logan recovering from a near-fatal stabbing and dealing with a particularly grim serial killer case. Subsequent novels piled more cases, more professional complications, and more of MacBride's uniquely textured Aberdeen onto Logan's increasingly battered shoulders.

Read the Logan McRae books in order — the character arcs and running jokes reward sequential reading. Start with Cold Granite for one of crime fiction's most entertaining and distinctive series. Fans of Christopher Brookmyre and Ian Rankin will love MacBride's voice.