DC Mairead Maclean Books in Order

The DC Mairead Maclean series moves Andrew Raymond’s crime fiction from the city streets of Glasgow to the windswept Hebrides. It introduces Detective Constable Mairead Maclean, a young officer who is both brilliant and scarred, and who brings a very different energy to his Scottish work.

The first novel, The Long Isle, begins with a body on a remote beach. Mairead is sent from mainland police to the islands she once called home, a place she worked hard to leave behind. The investigation forces her to walk the same lanes and shorelines she knew as a teenager, but now as an outsider wearing a warrant card.

Life on the Long Isle is close knit, but not always warm. The community guards its secrets, and everyone knows everyone else’s family history. Mairead has to earn the locals’ trust while also asking painful questions about old grievances, land, money, and the tight web of connections that bind a small population together.

At the same time, she is wrestling with her own past. The case stirs up memories of why she left the islands and what she thought she would never have to face again. Raymond uses that inner conflict to give the story an extra layer: every breakthrough in the case costs Mairead something personally, whether it is sleep, safety, or another piece of her carefully controlled composure.

The Hebridean setting lets the series lean into atmospheric detail. Storms, ferries, and failing mobile signals are not just background colour; they shape when evidence can be collected, when suspects can leave, and how isolated Mairead feels at key moments. The landscape is beautiful but unforgiving, mirroring the emotional weather of the characters who live there.

Although The Long Isle stands as a complete mystery, it also lays groundwork for a longer arc. Mairead’s relationships with colleagues, with islanders who remember her as a child, and with the memories she has tried to bury all have room to grow and tangle in future books. Readers who enjoy Tartan Noir with a strong sense of place and a focus on one determined, slightly damaged detective will find something new here, set apart from but connected in spirit to Raymond’s DCI Lomond novels.