Craig Hunter Police Thriller Books in Order

The Craig Hunter novels grew out of the Scott Cullen universe, giving centre stage to a character who had already made a strong impression. Craig Hunter is ex-Army, scarred by his time in uniform and haunted by what he saw on deployment. When readers meet him he is working for Police Scotland in Edinburgh, sometimes in a local policing unit, sometimes attached to more specialist teams, always bringing that soldier’s mindset to his cases.

In Missing, a call that should be routine quickly spirals out of control. Hunter attends what looks like a domestic disturbance and hears 16-year-old Stephanie Ferguson accuse her stepfather of abuse. Before investigators can take a full statement, Stephanie vanishes from hospital. Working alongside DS Chantal Jain of the Sexual Offences Unit, Hunter has to decide who to trust, how much weight to give Stephanie’s words and whether the danger is coming from inside the family or from someone trying to silence her.

Hunted raises the stakes even further. Hunter is part of the Sexual Offences Unit, tracking a predatory soldier named Sean Tulloch, who charms his way into women’s homes and then systematically abuses them. When Tulloch’s partner receives a violent threat and ends up in hospital, the case explodes. The Royal Military Police are involved, motives are murky and a simple trip to Portugal turns into a manhunt where jurisdictional lines blur and no one is sure whose side the Army investigators are really on.

In The Black Isle, Hunter’s professional and personal lives collide. A bungled raid sends him back to his old Edinburgh unit, where he is handed what should be a fresh start on a major case. Then he gets a message from his brother Murray, who has disappeared while running a popular online channel from a remote house in the Scottish Highlands. Hunter travels north to the Black Isle, a stretch of land just above Inverness, where he finds a missing brother, an estranged father housesitting and a community that knows far more than it will say to an outsider.

Across these stories, Hunter is never just a standard detective. His Army background colours how he assesses risk, how he responds to authority and how he treats trauma in others. He understands violence and its aftermath in a way many of his colleagues do not, which makes him both a valuable asset and, occasionally, a liability. His tendency to push himself to breaking point mirrors some of Scott Cullen’s flaws, but he carries very different scars.

The Craig Hunter books often cross paths with other strands of James’s Police Scotland fiction. Cullen, Bain and other familiar faces appear as allies or obstacles, and later Police Scotland titles fold Hunter’s cases into a larger sequence. For readers who like their crime fiction with a strong action element and a focus on sexual crimes, institutional pressure and the long tail of military service, these novels offer a grittier, more physical spin on the Edinburgh setting.