Ambrose Parry Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: The Way of All Flesh
If you want the main series in order: The Way of All Flesh → The Art of Dying → A Corruption of Blood → Voices of the Dead → The Death of Shame
If you want a short sampler first: The Spendthrift and the Swallow → The Way of All Flesh
If you want the extra stories once you're hooked: The Spendthrift and the Swallow → The Apple Falls Not Far

Ambrose Parry is the shared pen name of Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman, a married couple who turned crime writing, medical history, and a very specific corner of Edinburgh into a historical mystery series. Their books live in the space where new ideas in medicine meet old social rules, and where a murder case can open up questions about class, gender, pain, and power.

Brookmyre came to the partnership as an established novelist. He was born in Glasgow and grew up in Barrhead, and over the years built a career writing fast, smart crime fiction with a strong sense of place and character. That instinct for pace and structure is part of what gives the Ambrose Parry books their energy, even when the subject matter gets grim.

Haetzman took a different route. She spent more than twenty years as a consultant anaesthetist, working in London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, then decided to step away and study for a master's degree in the history of medicine. For her dissertation she researched the early use of ether and chloroform in mid nineteenth-century Edinburgh, a trail that led straight to the doctor James Young Simpson and the city around him.

That research changed everything.

Haetzman has written that she never grew up wanting to write fiction. But the more she read about Simpson, anaesthesia, and the chaos of Victorian medical life, the harder it was to let the material go. Brookmyre saw the same thing and suggested there might be a novel in it. The pair chose the name Ambrose Parry as an anglicised nod to Ambroise Paré, then worked out how to write together in a way that used both of their strengths.

They found their lane by making the history part of the mystery.

Their first novel, The Way of All Flesh, introduced readers to Will Raven, a young medical student, Sarah Fisher, a housemaid with a sharp mind and sharper instincts, and a version of Edinburgh that feels both vivid and dangerous. The book uses a murder investigation to open up the world of obstetrics, early anaesthesia, and the city's brutal social divide. That mix, crime story on the surface, social and medical history underneath, became the model for what followed.

In The Art of Dying, A Corruption of Blood, Voices of the Dead, and The Death of Shame, the duo keep widening the scope. The mysteries bring in unexplained deaths, human remains, mesmerism, missing women, blackmail, and the many ways respectable society protects itself. Readers who stay with the series tend to come back for the same reasons: Sarah's fight to claim a place in medicine, Raven's uneasy moral growth, the warmth and force of Dr Simpson, and the sheer pull of Victorian Edinburgh as a setting.

What makes the books feel a little different is the way Haetzman's clinical background sits inside the fiction rather than beside it. The medicine is never just wallpaper. Questions about who gets treated, who gets believed, and who is allowed to learn or lead are built into the plots. The novels return again and again to women pushed to the margins, to the gap between public virtue and private behavior, and to the uneasy truth that progress rarely arrives cleanly.

Brookmyre and Haetzman still live in Scotland, and Ambrose Parry remains a true joint venture rather than a borrowed label. One half brings decades of storytelling craft. The other brings hands-on medical experience and the curiosity of a historian. Put together, they have made a series that feels carefully researched and very alive.