Stuart MacBride's Aberdeen: The Logan McRae Series and Where to Start
April 27, 2026
Stuart MacBride writes the kind of crime fiction that makes you laugh out loud and then feel immediately guilty about it. His Logan McRae series is set in Aberdeen — a city that MacBride renders with an almost perverse affection: grey, brutal, expensive, and full of people making terrible decisions.
It is also one of the best-sustained runs in British crime fiction. Thirteen novels in, and the series hasn’t lost its voice.
The Logan McRae Series
13 novels | 2005–present
Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Logan McRae works for Grampian Police in Aberdeen. He is competent, unlucky, frequently injured, and surrounded by colleagues who range from merely difficult to actively dangerous. His relationship with Detective Chief Inspector Steel — his sardonic, foul-mouthed, politically incorrect superior — is the comic and emotional heart of the series.
MacBride’s Aberdeen is not a tourist board version. It is a working port city with a serious drug problem, a history of violence, and weather that functions as a character in its own right. The darkness of the cases is genuine — MacBride doesn’t shy away from the realities of serious crime — but the black humour running through everything prevents the series from ever becoming purely grim.
What makes the Logan McRae books work over thirteen novels is the accumulation of consequence. Characters carry their damage forward. The city changes. Logan himself — beaten, promoted, demoted, beaten again — evolves in ways that feel earned rather than reset between books.
The Reading Order
Read in publication order. The series rewards continuity — characters develop, relationships shift, and earlier plot threads surface in later books in ways that only land if you’ve followed the sequence.
- Cold Granite (2005)
- Dying Light (2006)
- Broken Skin (2007)
- Flesh House (2008)
- Blind Eye (2009)
- Dark Blood (2010)
- Shatter the Bones (2011)
- Close to the Bone (2012)
- The Missing and the Dead (2014)
- In the Cold Dark Ground (2016)
- The Blood Road (2018)
- All That’s Dead (2019)
- This House of Burning Bones (2025)
Start here:
The most recent entry, This House of Burning Bones, arrived in 2025.
The Wider Aberdeen Universe
MacBride has written several other books set in or around the same world, with characters that brush up against the Logan McRae cast.
The Ash Henderson Series — three novels (Birthdays for the Dead, A Song for the Dying, The Coffinmaker’s Garden) featuring a different detective working a different corner of Scottish crime. Darker in tone than the McRae books, with less of the black comedy. Ash Henderson is a grimmer protagonist, and his series is correspondingly grimmer — but readers who want to see more of MacBride’s Scotland without Logan’s particular chaos will find it here.
A Dark So Deadly (2017) — a standalone set in a fictionalised version of Aberdeen, following a different protagonist. It functions as a darkly comic counterpart to the McRae books: same city, same atmosphere, different case, different cast. Worth reading once you’ve established yourself in the main series.
Now We Are Dead (2017) — features DS Claire Young, who appears in the McRae series. Another angle on the same city.
None of these require prior knowledge of Logan McRae to read, but they reward it. The Aberdeen that MacBride has built across all these books is genuinely coherent — the same city, seen from different angles.
Who Should Read This Series
The Logan McRae books work best for readers who:
- Like crime fiction that takes its cases seriously but doesn’t take itself too seriously
- Can tolerate — or actively enjoy — very dark subject matter delivered with genuine wit
- Want a long-running series with real character development across many books
- Are interested in a Britain that isn’t London: the North Sea economy, the oil industry, the particular texture of a Scottish city
If you’ve enjoyed Ian Rankin’s Rebus series and want something with a similar sense of place but a more deliberately comic register, Logan McRae is the natural next step. MacBride’s Aberdeen and Rankin’s Edinburgh are neighbouring universes in British crime fiction — different cities, different characters, the same understanding of what Scotland actually looks like.
The Short Stories
MacBride has also written several Logan McRae short stories, collected in 22 Dead Little Bodies and Other Stories (2015). These fill in gaps between novels and are worth reading after you’ve established yourself in the main series — they work best when you already know the characters.