Owen Mullen Books in Order

If you want Glasgow PI crime: Games People Play → Old Friends and New Enemies / The Wronged → Before The Devil Knows You're Dead / Whistleblower → The Accused
If you want gangland family drama: Family → Insider → Hustle → Thief
If you want an American-set detective thriller: And So It Began
If you want darker domestic suspense: In Harm's Way → Deadly Harm
If you want twisty psychological thrillers: Three Sisters → The Wrong Woman → Out of the Silence

Owen Mullen is a Scottish crime writer from Coatbridge, in the west of Scotland. His route to fiction was anything but tidy. Before the novels came music, university, business, travel, and a long stretch of ordinary working life that later fed into the rough edges and lived-in feeling of his books.

At 10, he won a national primary school short story competition, then left fiction alone for decades.

Music came first. As a young man he played in bands, moved to London, and worked as a rock musician, songwriter, and session singer. He has said that one of those records even became a hit in Japan, though he has never seemed very interested in turning that part of his life into a grand myth.

Back in Scotland, he went to Strathclyde University, started a marketing and design business, and lectured at a Glasgow college. It was a different life, but it gave him material: workplace politics, bluff, ambition, and the way people talk when they are hiding something.

Travel mattered too. He and his wife Christine spent years on the move, with trips that took them well beyond Scotland, and they later made a home in the Greek islands. Mullen has said the idea for Games People Play first came to him on a beach in Crete. He has also said that when he decided to write a detective story set in New Orleans, memories of time spent there came rushing back.

Then came the late turn toward writing. By his own telling, he got up one morning, told Christine he was going to write a book, and got on with it. That decision arrived after years of doing other things, which may be one reason his fiction is so interested in second chances, old mistakes, and the weight of the past.

His debut, Games People Play, introduced Glasgow private investigator Charlie Cameron and was longlisted for the McIlvanney Crime Book of the Year in 2017. The Charlie Cameron books, including The Wronged, Whistleblower, and The Accused, are fast Glasgow crime stories, full of missing persons cases, underworld pressure, and people trying to hold things together when events have already slipped beyond them.

He does not stay in one lane. And So It Began takes him to New Orleans with ex-cop turned PI Vincent Delaney. Family, Insider, Hustle, and Thief move into gangland territory through the Glass family. In Harm's Way and Deadly Harm are tighter psychological thrillers, more intimate and more domestic in the way danger closes around the characters. Under the name O. J. Mullen, he has also written books like Three Sisters and The Wrong Woman, which lean hard into secrets, obsession, and the cracks inside everyday relationships.

He arrived at fiction late, but he did not arrive quietly.

Place matters in all of this. Glasgow keeps returning, not as scenery but as a city of sharp humour, buried hurt, and long memories. Even when Mullen writes farther afield, he tends to stay close to the same pressure points: family loyalty, revenge, coercion, corruption, and the moment an ordinary life tips into panic. He still splits his time between Scotland and the Greek islands, and Christine remains part of the creative world around the books. He has said they develop the novels together, which feels right for stories so tuned to voice, tension, and the small turns that reveal character.