Helen Forbes Books in Order

Helen Forbes was born in Wick, on Scotland’s north coast, and moved to Inverness when she was six. The Highlands have remained central to both her life and her fiction, especially the city, the islands, and the contrast between beautiful landscapes and the difficult lives lived within them.

Her route to publication was not a straight line. Before becoming a lawyer, Forbes worked as a veterinary nurse in Inverness. She later lived and worked in places including the Outer Hebrides, Fife, and Edinburgh, and studied law as a mature student. Her work in social welfare law has also shaped the concerns that appear in her stories.

Writing was something she kept making time for alongside everything else.

As a single parent and law student, Forbes used her limited spare hours to write contemporary and historical Scottish fiction. Her early work included short stories that received recognition in writing competitions. In 2008, her novel Land of the Dead won first prize in the Edinburgh Writers’ Club Annual Novel Competition, marking an important early step in her writing life.

Crime fiction came along by accident, or at least by one useful question from another writer. Forbes had written a short story about two boys growing up on an unnamed island beneath a hill. Someone asked what had happened to them when they grew older. She began to imagine the answer, and one of those boys became Detective Sergeant Joe Galbraith.

That small prompt opened the door to a whole new direction.

Forbes published In the Shadow of the Hill in 2014. The novel introduces Joe as an Inverness detective whose investigation takes him back to Harris, the island tied to his troubled childhood. Madness Lies, published in 2017, follows Joe on another case that moves between Inverness, North Uist, and London. Together, the books use the pace of a police investigation while keeping Joe’s memories and personal pressures close to the surface.

Her later novels have continued to explore crime, secrets, and the long reach of the past. Unravelling grew from research into the records of Craig Dunain Hospital in Inverness. Deception moves to Edinburgh and follows a relationship built on lies, while Queen of Grime introduces Erin Flett, an Edinburgh crime-scene cleaner trying to protect the life she has built for herself and her daughter.

Forbes is interested in island communities and the Gaelic language, and those interests give her Highland and Hebridean settings real weight. Her books often look beyond the crime itself, toward family history, money worries, hidden harm, and the ways a place can hold on to old secrets.

She lives in Inverness and continues to take part in book events, talks, and writing conversations. The places she knows best are still there in the work, not as postcard scenery, but as lived-in settings where people carry their history with them.