Solanki & McQueen Books in Order

The Solanki and McQueen series takes Liz Mistry’s crime writing north of the border, pairing two Scottish detectives whose lives are anything but straightforward. DS Jazzy Solanki and Annie McQueen work major crimes in and around West Lothian, bringing very different temperaments to a partnership that has to survive gang wars, family vendettas and old wounds that refuse to stay buried.

In the opening novel, The Blood Promise, sixteen-year-old Imogen Clark wakes to a nightmare on her birthday: both parents dead at the breakfast table and a chilling note from their killer. Jazzy and Annie are called in, but what should be a devastatingly clear-cut family massacre soon begins to feel personal. Imogen shares a birthday with Jazzy, and the timing, the message and a long-standing stalker in Jazzy’s life suggest the murders are as much about the detective as the victim.

That uneasy sense of someone pulling strings from the shadows continues into The Revenge Pact. Two young men, Tommy and Markie Jones, are found dead at the roadside, and they are quickly identified as nephews of Loanie Gibbs, a powerful Edinburgh gang boss. Their murders threaten to blow open the already fraught balance between Edinburgh and Glasgow crews. While Jazzy and Annie try to stop a full-scale turf war, hints of a leak inside the police force emerge, and Jazzy is asked to keep watch on someone very close to her, testing her loyalties to the limit.

By the time Deadly Reckoning begins, Jazzy is desperate for a quiet day and takes a solitary spring walk, only to stumble over a body on her route. Instinct tells her this is no random discovery. The evidence points toward her estranged stepsister, still consumed by grief and anger over their brother’s death. When a child goes missing soon after, the investigation becomes a race against time, with every clue dragging Jazzy back into family conflicts she has tried hard to leave behind.

Throughout the series, Mistry uses the landscapes and communities of West Lothian, Edinburgh and the wider central belt as more than just backdrop. Small towns, housing estates, back roads and gang territories all carry history, giving the crimes a specificity that feels grounded rather than generic. The books balance the menace of Scottish gangland with the daily realities of policing, paperwork and fraught team dynamics.

What really anchors these stories, though, is the relationship between Solanki and McQueen themselves. Both are capable, sometimes prickly women who carry their own scars and secrets, but across the books their trust, banter and occasional clashes build a layered partnership. Readers coming to the series can expect tightly plotted investigations, strong emotional stakes and a fresh, Scottish spin on the modern police procedural.