SG MacLean Books in Order

S. G. MacLean writes historical crime novels that drop readers into the noise and danger of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Under that pen name, Scottish writer Shona MacLean has created series and standalones where political upheaval and everyday life constantly collide.

She was born in Inverness in 1968 and grew up in Highland towns where her parents ran hotels, including Muir of Ord on the Moray Firth. Moving between small communities, watching guests and neighbours come and go, she absorbed a feel for landscapes and local stories that would later feed her fiction.

At school in Dingwall she gravitated toward history, then went on to the University of Aberdeen, where she took an MA and a PhD in history, specialising in sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland. Years of work in archives and old court records gave her the texture of real voices, disputes and beliefs from the period she now writes about.

By the time she finished her doctorate she already had three of her four children, and the academic career she had imagined no longer fit so neatly. When her husband’s job took the family to the coastal town of Banff, she found herself surrounded by streets and buildings that matched the world she had been researching, and the urge to tell stories on the page became hard to ignore.

Out of that period came The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, her debut novel, set in 1620s Banff and following a disgraced minister turned schoolmaster who is drawn into a poisoning case. The book was initially rejected many times but eventually found a home and went on to be shortlisted for major historical fiction prizes, launching a series that explores witchcraft scares, religious division and the rough politics of early seventeenth century Scotland.

MacLean’s second long-running project moves forward a generation to the Cromwellian 1650s. In the Damian Seeker novels, beginning with The Seeker and continuing through The Black Friar, Destroying Angel, The Bear Pit and The House of Lamentations, she follows a feared intelligence officer for Oliver Cromwell as he hunts plots in London coffee houses, Yorkshire villages and the exiled Royalist communities of Flanders. Two of these books, The Seeker and Destroying Angel, have won the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger, with The Black Friar also recognised by the judges.

Later she shifted further along the timeline to the aftermath of Culloden in The Bookseller of Inverness, in which a scarred former Jacobite soldier tries to live quietly as a bookseller until a murder in his shop drags him back into old loyalties. The novel went on to win the Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year award in 2023, showing how comfortably her interests in rebellion, memory and community carry into the eighteenth century as well.

Across all her work, MacLean tends to focus less on monarchs and generals and more on ministers, tradespeople, soldiers and scholars who are forced to navigate huge shifts in power. Her stories are full of cramped taverns, kirks and tenements, and of characters wrestling with belief, compromise and the cost of violence. The historical research is deep, but the tone stays human and accessible, inviting readers into complex times rather than lecturing them about dates.

She is the niece of adventure novelist Alistair MacLean, but has built a very different corner of the family bookshelf. Now based in the Highlands near Inverness, in Conon Bridge, she lives with her husband, a head teacher, their four children and a dog, and continues to write, teach and appear at festivals while drawing fresh stories from archives and the landscapes she knows best.