Marsali Taylor Books in Order

If you want Cass's story from the beginning: Death on a Longship → The Trowie Mound Murders → A Handful of Ash → The Body in the Bracken.
If you enjoy mysteries at sea: Death in Shetland Waters → Death on a Shetland Isle → Death from a Shetland Cliff → The Shetland Sea Murders.
If you like wintry, folklore-tinged crime: A Shetland Winter Mystery → Death in a Shetland Lane.
If you want the newest investigations: Death at a Shetland Festival → An Imposter in Shetland.

Marsali Taylor grew up in Musselburgh, just outside Edinburgh, with childhood summers spent in a remote cottage in the West Highlands. Those contrasting landscapes, town streets and wild coasts, would later feed straight into the worlds she writes about.

At university she read English at Dundee, then moved on to teacher training in Edinburgh. As a newly qualified teacher she arrived in Shetland in her early twenties, taking up a post at Aith Junior High School teaching English, French and drama. She planned to stay a few years, but the islands and their communities kept her there for her whole classroom career.

Her first published pieces were written for her pupils. She staged original plays for the local drama festival, some of which later appeared in print, and she began contributing articles to the monthly magazine Shetland Life. Away from school she was always scribbling, trying out novels and short stories set in the places she knew best.

Sailing has been part of her life just as long as storytelling. She learned in dinghies on the Firth of Forth and spent gap year earnings on her first boat, a small racing dinghy called Lady Blue. In Shetland she went on to qualify as a dinghy instructor and now sails an eight metre keelboat, Karima S, exploring the same sounds, voes and tide races that her characters navigate.

Crime fiction gave her a way to bring all of those strands together. In 2012 she introduced liveaboard skipper Cass Lynch and Inverness detective Gavin Macrae in Death on a Longship, the first of the Shetland Sailing Mysteries. Later novels such as Buried in a Shetland Tomb, A Handful of Ash, The Shetland Sea Murders and A Shetland Winter Mystery continue to mix classic puzzle plotting with close attention to boats, weather and local life.

Readers often talk about how vividly the series evokes place. Each book focuses on a particular corner of Shetland and a particular season, from agricultural shows and folk festivals to winter storms and long midsummer evenings. The stories weave in island history, Norse and Scottish folklore, and the pressures of modern life in a small community, all seen through the eyes of a stubborn, curious sailor who is never quite as detached as she pretends.

Alongside the novels, Taylor has a long-standing interest in women's history and local stories. Her research into suffrage produced Women's Suffrage in Shetland, and she has also written The Story of Busta House, a narrative history of one of Shetland's most striking old houses. Her journalism ranges from travel and interviews to pieces on everyday island life.

She is a qualified tourist guide for Shetland and has spent many summers showing visitors around the islands, from archaeological sites to working harbours. That guiding work, and years of listening to local voices, feed into the small details that make her fictional Shetland communities feel lived in.

These days she lives on Shetland's scenic west side with her composer husband, a small herd of very indulged cats and a self-willed Shetland pony. When she is not out on the water, she is involved in local drama, reads widely, and still loves the quiet rhythms of island life.

Taylor keeps a steady writing routine, planning each book around its setting, then visiting in the right week to walk the routes, note the weather and take photographs. Back home, she turns that notebook material into stories that carry readers from a cosy galley to a stormy anchorage in a few pages.