Scott Cullen Mysteries Books in Order

The Scott Cullen mysteries are where Ed James’s crime universe began. Set in and around Edinburgh, they follow Scott Cullen from fresh-faced detective constable to a more seasoned investigator, tracing not just the cases he works but the messy progress of his career, friendships and love life inside a changing police force.

In Ghost in the Machine, Cullen has been with Lothian and Borders CID for only a few months. He is young, keen and desperate to prove himself when he is handed what should be a straightforward missing persons enquiry. Caroline Adamson, newly divorced and rebuilding her life, has disappeared along with the man she met through a social network called Schoolbook. When her mutilated body is discovered and a second victim surfaces, Cullen and his colleagues realise they are hunting a serial killer who is using the internet to stalk women.

Devil in the Detail takes him out of the city and into the more affluent East Lothian town of Garleton. A disabled schoolgirl, Mandy Gibson, is found dead, and suspicion quickly falls on a local tearaway teenager. As Cullen digs into the case he discovers both families attend a tight-knit religious group, and what looked like a simple suspect begins to look like part of a much more complicated web of loyalties, secrets and control.

In Fire in the Blood, the discovery of a body inside a barrel of aged whisky at Dunpender Distillery forces Cullen to step back two decades. Two men went missing around the time that barrel was filled, and no one ever found their bodies. Now Cullen is juggling office politics with DI Bain, questions about his own stalled promotion and a family-run business that has spent years hiding its fault-lines.

Subsequent books such as Dyed in the Wool, Bottleneck and Windchill push him further. Cullen deals with murders tied to the music industry, Christmas killings in Edinburgh’s Old Town, violent jealousies and organised crime. He navigates the creation of Police Scotland from the old regional forces, watching colleagues jockey for position while trying not to lose his own moral compass. By the time the series reaches Cowboys and Indians and Heroes and Villains, he has become a more senior detective, but the gap between how he wants to police and what the job demands has only grown.

A big part of the appeal here is the supporting cast. DI Brian Bain looms large as both mentor and antagonist, embodying a rough-edged, corner-cutting style of policing that Cullen admires and resents in equal measure. Other characters, like Shona McNeil and Craig Hunter, begin as colleagues and later earn books of their own. The series tracks not just who solves each case but who gets credit, who gets promoted and who is chewed up by the system.

Stylistically, the Scott Cullen books are classic police procedurals with a modern twist: lots of squad-room banter, detailed legwork and a strong sense of Edinburgh as a working city rather than just a postcard skyline. Each novel can be read on its own, but following them in order lets readers see Cullen grow from eager rookie to battle-scarred detective, and sets up many of the threads that run through the wider Police Scotland world.