Slains Books in Order

Under the umbrella of the Slains series, Susanna Kearsley gathers three loosely linked novels—The Winter Sea, The Firebird and The Vanished Days—that circle around the same stretch of Scottish coast and the same troubled years of Jacobite history. The books share characters, families and secrets, but they’re written so you can step in anywhere. Rather than a conventional trilogy with cliff-hanger endings, they feel more like three windows looking onto the same landscape from different angles.

The Winter Sea is the natural starting point for many readers. In the present, novelist Carrie McClelland rents a cottage in sight of the ruins of Slains Castle and begins to write about the failed 1708 attempt to return the exiled James Stewart to the Scottish throne. As she writes, she finds herself channelling the life of Sophia Paterson, an ancestor who lived through the plot. Carrie's ancestral memory turns her work-in-progress into a love story rooted in real political danger.

The Firebird moves the modern storyline to London and Russia but keeps one foot at Slains. Nicola Marter, who can see fragments of the past when she touches an object, is asked to authenticate a small wood carving said to have belonged to Empress Catherine. To prove it, she teams up with her former lover Rob, whose own psychic gift is much stronger, and follows a girl named Anna through Jacobite intrigue from Scotland across Europe to St Petersburg, tracing the farthest ripples of Slains-era events.

The Vanished Days steps further back in time. Set around the 1707 Union between Scotland and England, it follows former soldier Adam Williamson as he investigates Lily Aitcheson, a young woman claiming the back pay of a dead sailor she says was her husband. Lily's account pulls the story deep into her childhood, the Moray and Graeme families, and the same political currents that will later crash around Sophia at Slains. It's more legal inquiry than ghost story, but the emotional stakes are just as high.

Across all three books you can expect certain hallmarks: a strong sense of place on the Aberdeenshire coast, careful attention to real historical figures, and quiet threads of the uncanny. Characters in the present lean on research, intuition and sometimes psychic glimpses to uncover what really happened three hundred years before, while the historical chapters follow ordinary people caught up in rebellion, exile and divided loyalties.

Read in any order, the Slains novels reward readers who enjoy layered timelines, slow-building romance and history told through intimate lives rather than big battle scenes. If you like to follow events chronologically, you might start with The Vanished Days and then move to The Winter Sea and The Firebird. If you prefer to begin where most readers did, start at Slains Castle with Carrie and let the later books fill in the wider picture.