DI Kelso Strang Books in Order

The DI Kelso Strang novels follow a senior detective in Scotland's Serious Rural Crime Squad as he is sent to the places most big-city officers rarely see. From the first book, the focus is on outlying communities, hard landscapes and the people who choose to live there.

Kelso Strang himself is a former army sniper turned detective, a man marked by the sudden death of his wife and the child they were expecting. He is self-contained, stubborn and sometimes abrasive, but he notices detail, listens more than he talks and takes his responsibilities seriously even when the job chips away at him.

In Human Face, he is dispatched to the Isle of Skye to look into a missing woman connected to a glossy charity for vulnerable young people. The organisation claims to save lives, yet its remote lodge, revolving door of housekeepers and charismatic director suggest a very different kind of power at work.

Later books move Strang and his small team across the Highlands and islands. In Carrion Comfort he works in the Flow Country of Caithness, where a body left in a ruined croft exposes an old feud and a family still shaped by a domineering father. Devil's Garden takes him to the Borders and into the orbit of a world-famous novelist whose family tragedy may not be what it seems.

Old Sins finds Strang trying to take a short walking holiday in the far north, only to be drawn into fierce arguments over rewilding, land ownership and whether an elderly woman's fall was really an accident. In Blind Eye he uncovers extortion and loss in a fishing port on the east coast, and in Deadfall a dark, tangled woodland on the Black Isle becomes the centre of a fight over money, science and loyalty.

Across the series, each case is rooted in a particular rural community, with its own history, politics and grudges. Templeton uses issues like environmental change, tourism, drugs and economic decline not as background wallpaper but as forces that shape why people act as they do.

The result is a quieter kind of procedural, where long drives on single-track roads, awkward family dinners and small-town gossip matter as much as forensics.

Strang grows over the books, too. His working relationship with young DC Livvy Murray becomes a source of tension and dry humour, and through Cat Fleming, a lawyer who happens to be DI Marjory Fleming's daughter, he slowly lets other people back into his life. Readers who like strong sense of place, moral complexity and the feeling of really inhabiting a community tend to settle happily into this series.