Tana Collins Books in Order

If you want the full Jim Carruthers story: Robbing the Dead → Care to Die → Mark Of The Devil → Dark is the Day → In Deep Water
If you like coastal Scottish crime with buried secrets: Care to Die → Mark Of The Devil → In Deep Water
If you want the newest Andrea Fletcher-led case: Point Blank

Tana Collins was born in Yorkshire and grew up in rural East Sussex, where woods, open space, and a busy imagination seem to have done some of the early work of making a novelist. She has described childhood as full of adventures and made-up stories, which feels fitting when you look at the books she writes now. Even at their darkest, her crime novels have a strong sense of place and the feeling that ordinary communities are hiding complicated histories.

Before fiction took over, Collins spent years in study. She attended the Polytechnic of North London, then moved to Canada for a master's in philosophy. In 1991 she moved to St Andrews and completed an MPhil in Logic and Metaphysics, then settled in Edinburgh in 1996. That mix of argument, observation, and curiosity shows up in her work, which often cares as much about motive and pressure as it does about the mechanics of a crime.

Crime fiction came to her later than you might expect.

She has said the turning point was reading Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season. Its sense of place, and the way the past pushed into the present, stayed with her. An exhibition on Ian Fleming gave her another nudge, this time toward writing rather than just reading. Not long after, she woke in the middle of the night with a title and opening scene, and that spark eventually became Robbing the Dead.

It was not a quick debut. Robbing the Dead took about ten years to finish, and Collins has spoken about rewriting it heavily after making progress on the next book. When it appeared in 2017, readers met DCI Jim Carruthers, DS Andrea Fletcher, and the fictional Fife town of Castletown. The book went on to become a number one Scottish crime fiction bestseller on Amazon, and it gave Collins a series she could keep building.

She clearly likes cases with long shadows.

In the Jim Carruthers books, old secrets have a habit of surfacing in messy, modern ways. Care to Die opens with the murder of an elderly man in a nature reserve and widens into a deeper story about the past. Mark Of The Devil mixes art theft, a body on a beach, and a trail that reaches beyond Fife. Dark is the Day turns the pressure inward by making Carruthers's ex-wife part of the danger, while In Deep Water uses the Isle of May and a missing fisherman to bring the series even closer to the sea.

What readers tend to like in Collins's work is not hard to spot. The books are police procedurals, but they are also very interested in small communities, uneasy loyalties, and the way personal strain follows officers home after a case. The East Neuk of Fife matters here. So do the university setting, the coast, and the sense that local history is never really finished. Even when the plots widen toward corruption or international links, the stories stay grounded in people and place.

After the first run of Jim Carruthers novels, Collins returned to that world with Point Blank in 2026, a new case led by Andrea Fletcher. It feels like a natural next step, because Fletcher has always been more than a sidekick in these books. Collins has also taught and supported other writers through workshops, courses, and manuscript feedback.

These days she still lives in Edinburgh. Her route to crime writing was a winding one, but that may be part of why the books feel both thoughtful and lived-in. They ask who did it, of course, but also why people keep secrets for so long.