Shona G MacLean Books in Order

If you want Cromwell-era intrigue: The Seeker → The Black Friar → Destroying Angel
If you want seventeenth-century Scotland: Redemption of Alexander Seaton → A Game of Sorrows → Crucible of Secrets → The Devil's Recruit
If you want a post-Culloden standalone: The Bookseller of Inverness
If you want her newest wider-cast historical fiction: The Cromarty Library Circle

Shona G MacLean was born in Inverness and grew up in the Scottish Highlands, where her parents were hoteliers. That background matters on the page. Her fiction is full of weather, close-knit communities and the sense that history can linger in a place long after the people who made it are gone.

She studied History at the University of Aberdeen and later earned a PhD focused on sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland. Years in archives gave her more than facts. They gave her a feel for how ordinary lives rubbed against church rules, political power and local gossip, which is exactly where many of her plots begin.

She once expected history, not fiction, to be her working life.

Instead, while raising four children, she began writing novels. She has said that family logistics pulled her away from the academic career she had imagined. Living in Banff, surrounded by old streets and buildings that still carried traces of the seventeenth century, she started to picture the people from her research stepping out of the records and into a story. She bought a notebook and began the book that became Redemption of Alexander Seaton.

That debut introduced Alexander Seaton, a fallen would-be minister turned teacher, and it set the pattern for much of her work: a murder mystery under real historical pressure, a bruised but thoughtful central character, and a setting that feels lived in. The later Alexander Seaton books, including A Game of Sorrows, Crucible of Secrets and The Devil's Recruit, widen that world without losing its human scale.

She later began publishing as S. G. MacLean for the Damian Seeker novels, set in Cromwell's England. Those books are tougher and more openly political, but they keep the same interest in conscience, loyalty and the price of survival. The Seeker and Destroying Angel both won the CWA Historical Dagger, and the series made Damian Seeker, Cromwell's feared investigator, one of her best-known characters.

History never sits quietly here.

Her standalones show the same strengths. The Bookseller of Inverness moves to the aftermath of Culloden and follows a scarred former Jacobite who would rather hide among his books than reopen old wounds. It won Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2023. More recently, The Cromarty Library Circle turns to a wider cast in an 1830s Highland town, showing that MacLean is just as interested in the pressures inside a community as in the mechanics of a crime plot.

Across all these books, certain things keep returning: divided loyalties, faith and doubt, the way large political changes land on ordinary homes, and people trying to do one decent thing in hard circumstances. Readers often come for the mystery, but many stay for the characters, who tend to be capable, worried, stubborn and recognisably human.

MacLean now lives in Conon Bridge in Scotland with her husband and their dog.