Jasmine Sharp Investigations Books in Order

The Jasmine Sharp Investigations books pair two very different women working the same brutal version of Glasgow. Jasmine is a former drama student whose acting career stalls just as her life is knocked sideways by family loss. Catherine McLeod is a senior detective juggling major investigations with marriage and motherhood. Their paths cross again and again as private and police work tug at the same set of buried secrets.

In Where the Bodies Are Buried, Catherine catches what looks like a routine gangland killing when a small‑time dealer is found dead in an alley. She knows it is a warning shot, not an end in itself. Elsewhere, Jasmine is reluctantly earning a living in her Uncle Jim’s one‑man PI agency, realising that improvisation and lying on cue are useful skills outside the theatre. When Jim vanishes, her search for him intersects with Catherine’s hunt for whoever is reshaping Glasgow’s drug trade.

When the Devil Drives starts as a cold case. Jasmine is hired to find out what happened to Tessa Garrion, a young actress who disappeared in the early 1980s after working for an ambitious theatre producer. As Jasmine pulls on that thread she uncovers a summer of drugs, sex and occult posturing at a Highland estate that some very powerful people would prefer to forget. At the same time Catherine is called to an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a castle where a prominent figure is shot dead in front of an audience, setting off a politically sensitive murder inquiry.

By Flesh Wounds, the stakes are painfully personal. Jasmine has formed a wary bond with Glen Fallan, the fearsome enforcer who killed the father she never knew, and now has to decide how much she is prepared to trust him when he is arrested for another gangland killing. Catherine sees a symbol painted on the victim that drags up ghosts from her own past and suggests a wider pattern of violence. The two women’s investigations move in parallel until they crash into the same long‑running feud.

The short story later retitled Siege Mentality gives Catherine a standalone outing, sending her to what should be a quiet bank‑holiday day at a tourist castle that turns into a hostage crisis. It shows how the wider universe of the series can support tighter, punchier tales without losing the sense of real jeopardy.

Compared with Brookmyre’s earlier, more overtly farcical novels, the Jasmine Sharp books lean toward straight police procedural, but they still carry his humour and political bite. Expect Glasgow’s streets and estates to feel lived‑in, families and friendships to matter as much as the casework, and for both protagonists to be changed by what they uncover over the course of the trilogy.