DI Rob Marshall Books in Order

The DI Rob Marshall series moves the action to the Scottish Borders, drawing on the hills, small towns and back roads of the region to frame investigations that are as much about past wounds as present crimes. Rob Marshall himself is a former criminal profiler who grew tired of sitting on the sidelines, analysing killers from afar. After a case in London went catastrophically wrong, he left that role and returned to policing, only to find that the ghosts he tried to escape are waiting for him.

The Turning of our Bones introduces Marshall as a Met detective on the trail of a serial killer nicknamed the Chameleon, a predator who changes identity to get close to victims. When that killer’s body is found years later, Marshall is drawn home to Melrose in the Borders to unravel what really happened and, more importantly, to find out whether the Chameleon’s final intended victim might still be alive. The investigation forces him to revisit the local tragedy that drove him away in the first place and to confront how much of his life has been shaped by that one failure.

In Where the Bodies Lie, Marshall is working for Police Scotland’s Borders Major Investigation Team when he is summoned to a high-security prison in England. A serial killer known as the Shadow Man, whose crimes Marshall once profiled, offers to reveal the location of one of his missing victims. When Marshall and the team follow him to a remote wooded area, they find not just the long-buried body they expect but three fresh corpses the Shadow Man could not have killed. That discovery kicks off a hunt across the Borders and north of England for a new murderer who may be copying, collaborating with or exploiting the earlier crimes.

A Lonely Place of Dying shifts the focus back onto the landscape. During a brutal winter, the bound bodies of a man and a woman are found frozen near a high road between Stow and Lauder. It is unclear whether they succumbed to the storm or were dumped there to die. With few leads and a hostile climate, Marshall has to rely on old-fashioned detective work and a deep understanding of the communities he grew up around, even as old enemies and memories resurface.

In A Shadow on the Door, Marshall’s team collides with organised crime. Gary Hislop, a hardware store owner building a ruthless criminal empire in the Borders, is attacked as he opens up for the day. What looks like a straightforward hit quickly proves to be more tangled, with hints that someone inside the police may be feeding information to Hislop’s organisation. Marshall finds himself trying to solve the case while also working out which of his own people he can safely trust.

Later books such as With Soul So Dead and His Path of Darkness show Marshall pulled between his old life and his new role. In one, he returns to work as a behavioural specialist when a woman who survived a serial killer years earlier believes she has seen her tormentor again while filming a documentary in Eyemouth, only for another woman to vanish. In the other, a young woman is found dead in a disused railway tunnel near Peebles, and Marshall, now based at a national Behavioural Sciences Unit in Gartcosh, is drawn back to the Borders to advise on a case that seems to widen with every clue.

Fear of Any Kind, Our Debts to the Past and Cuts Both Ways continue to explore how the region’s history and tight-knit communities feed into present-day crimes. A murdered teenager in Hawick dredges up echoes of an earlier investigation. An unsolved killing at Scott’s View from the year 2000 forces Marshall to look at the Borders’ long-standing ties to emigration and the stories families tell themselves about those who left. A choreographed series of deaths in both Edinburgh and London brings him into contact with a new detective, Sam Winter, and suggests that someone is using Marshall and his colleagues as pieces in a larger game.

Throughout the series, Rob Marshall copes with trauma using dry, sometimes biting humour, but the books never lose sight of the cost of the work. They are police procedurals with a strong through-line of psychological insight and a sense of place so strong that the Borders landscape feels like another character in the story.