Anne Randall Books in Order

If you want the full series arc: Riven → Silenced → Torn → Deceived
If you want the clearest entry point: Riven
If you prefer darker manhunt suspense: Silenced → Torn
If you want family secrets and psychological tension: Deceived

Anne Randall was born in Glasgow, and before she published crime novels she did a surprising range of jobs. She worked as a cadet nurse, a flower-seller, a civil servant, and later taught English in secondary schools in inner Glasgow. She eventually retrained as a psychotherapist, which helps explain why her books pay such close attention to motive, damage, and the stories people tell themselves to get through the day.

Glasgow is not just her setting, it is part of her method.

Her first big public step as a crime writer came in 2011, when Riven won first prize for crime fiction writing at the Wells Literature Festival. When the novel reached readers, it appeared under the name A. J. McCreanor. From Silenced onward, the Wheeler and Ross books were published as Anne Randall, a switch that helped separate the novels from her psychotherapy work. It also gave the series a clearer identity for readers following the detectives from book to book.

Randall has said she always imagined Wheeler and Ross as continuing characters, not a one-book pairing. That matters when you read the series. The books follow Detective Inspectors Kat Wheeler and Steven Ross through hard Glasgow cases, but they also leave room for the detectives' blind spots, loyalties, and weariness. In Riven, a murdered psychologist, a dead student, and an addict's fatal jump pull the case into a web of lies that reaches close to Wheeler's own family.

Her crime fiction is dark, but it is never chilly.

Silenced turns to an escaped killer, a missing young woman, and a trail of deaths among homeless people. Torn moves into the worlds of sex clubs, celebrity, and influence. Deceived starts with a missing woman, then tightens around a murdered father and his medically vulnerable daughter. Across these books, Randall keeps asking what happens when power, shame, secrecy, and family life all crash into each other. The cases are solved through police work, but the emotional mess around them is just as important.

Her background helps explain why the novels spend so much time on people at the edge of the investigation, not just detectives and killers. Teachers notice who is slipping away. Therapists listen for what is not being said. Randall brings both instincts to the page. Her Glasgow is full of vulnerable teenagers, damaged adults, rough sleepers, hustlers, and institutions that do not always protect the people who need them most. That mix gives the books a strong social thread without turning them into lectures.

She has also talked very plainly about how she writes, whenever and wherever she can. In her office. On buses. In cafes. Sometimes in a local pub, sometimes in a hotel room while on holiday, with a notebook close by for stray lines and scenes. She has run a busy psychotherapy practice and facilitated writing groups alongside her fiction, so the books feel shaped by real working life rather than by some sealed-off idea of the author at her desk.

Randall now lives in Glastonbury with her husband, two rescued cats, and a dog. The first Wheeler and Ross novel still turns up under A. J. McCreanor, while the later books appear as Anne Randall. Either way, the draw is much the same: sharp Glasgow-set police novels with a strong feel for consequence, vulnerability, and the human cost of violence.