Duncan McCormack Books in Order

The Duncan McCormack novels are historical police procedurals set in Glasgow during a period of upheaval. In The Quaker and The Heretic, Liam McIlvanney uses real events and tensions from the late 1960s and 1970s as a backdrop for investigations that reach from bomb-damaged streets to council offices and private clubs. The books blend the puzzle of a crime novel with the texture of social history.

At the centre is Detective Inspector Duncan McCormack, a Highlander posted to a city that never fully accepts him. He is a Catholic in a force dominated by Protestant colleagues, ambitious enough to challenge his superiors yet wary of how far the institution will let him go. McCormack is clever, stubborn and not above bending rules, but he also carries personal secrets that make him careful about whom he trusts.

The Quaker is set in 1969, with Glasgow in the grip of its coldest winter in years and a serial killer haunting the dance halls. Three women have been murdered after nights out at the same ballroom, and the investigation has stalled despite huge police resources. McCormack is brought in from another division to review the case, part internal auditor and part scapegoat, and quickly realises that his new colleagues would rather pin the crimes on a convenient suspect than admit how little they know. The book follows him through condemned tenements, city cemeteries and the aftermath of a jewel heist as he looks for a link that others have missed.

Glasgow here is not just a location but a maze of disappearing streets, rough pubs and bomb sites that shape every decision the characters make.

In The Heretic, McCormack returns to the city after time with the London police and finds Glasgow changed but no less volatile. A warehouse fire that kills a young mother and child looks like another move in a brutal gang war, and at the same time a mutilated body turns up on a rubbish heap, identified as a disgraced former politician. As McCormack and his team investigate, a pub bombing tears through the city and the cases begin to converge, drawing in an elusive crime boss, property developers and figures with friends in high places. The plot widens from back alleys to boardrooms, while McCormack's own position inside the force grows more precarious.

Across the series McIlvanney is interested in how power works: who gets to decide what counts as justice, and what happens to the people who do not fit the official story. The books have the pace of a crime thriller, but they also linger on friendships within the squad, the casual brutality of policing at the time and the compromises demanded by a career in uniform. You can read each novel as a self-contained mystery, yet starting with The Quaker before The Heretic lets you watch McCormack's career, and Glasgow itself, change from one era to the next.