Barking Mad Trilogy Books in Order

The Barking Mad Trilogy is Rankin’s most openly theological run of books, though theological here means saints with sprout fetishes, talking handbags and God treated as a slightly wayward family patriarch. The three novels are loosely linked by recurring ideas about faith, storytelling and what happens when mortals get too close to the divine.

Sprout Mask Replica reads like a wildly embroidered family memoir. Its narrator recounts generations of relatives obsessed with Brussels sprouts and religion: levitating preachers in weighted shoes, rhyming lay ministers and ancestors who treat miracles as just another hazard of country life. The tall tales build a picture of a clan for whom belief and absurdity are inseparable.

In The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag, young Billy sells his grandmother’s soul to a shady tech firm and is rewarded with the handbag she leaves him in her will. The bag talks, of course, and offers access to the Necronet – an afterlife database where the dead can be browsed like files, and where meddling with the system has consequences in both worlds.

Waiting For Godalming pushes the central joke as far as it will go: God has been murdered in a back alley, and fifties‑style private eye Lazlo Woodbine is hired by the Almighty’s widow to find the killer. Suspects include a sidelined son and business‑minded relatives who think creation would be better run as a property empire.

Across all three books, Rankin plays with religious language and Sunday‑school imagery, but the tone stays more cheeky than cruel. The trilogy asks what happens when ordinary people treat holy matters as just another part of the everyday hustle – and suggests that, if the universe is being managed from on high, the management may not be as competent as advertised.

If you enjoy irreverent takes on gods, devils and the afterlife, delivered with daft family stories and shameless wordplay, this trilogy is very much for you.