Tariq Ashkanani Books in Order

Tariq Ashkanani is a Scottish crime writer and solicitor based in Edinburgh. His novels lean into dark investigations, compromised people, and places where trouble has had a long time to settle in. He writes crime stories with a strong sense of pressure, where a bad decision can keep spreading through every part of a character's life.

Writing was there early. As a child, Ashkanani filled notebooks with stories, often shaped by whatever he was enjoying at the time. He has joked that he earned a writing badge in Scouts while other children were out collecting more adventurous ones. It fits the picture of a writer who was always making things up, long before publishing felt like a realistic goal.

For a while, though, a full novel seemed harder to finish than to imagine. That changed after he joined a writing group in 2012. The group gave him a prompt and a deadline each week, which helped him turn ideas into complete short stories. One detective-story exercise, about two officers investigating the murder of a young woman, became the first spark for Welcome to Cooper.

The spark took time to become a book.

Ashkanani drafted and redrafted Welcome to Cooper while balancing writing with his legal work, including commutes between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The novel introduced Cooper, Nebraska, an invented small town that feels cut off from the rest of the world. Its lead, disgraced detective Thomas Levine, arrives looking for a fresh start and instead finds murder, police corruption, blackmail, and a town that seems built to swallow people whole.

Published in 2021, Welcome to Cooper won the Bloody Scotland Debut Award and was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger and the Capital Crime Fingerprint Award. Readers who like bleak American-style noir, damaged detectives, and tightly wound cases will find plenty to dig into. Ashkanani chose an imagined Nebraska setting partly because it gave him room to build Cooper from the ground up, away from the usual big-city crime-fiction map.

He returned to that world in Follow Me to the Edge, a prequel focused on young detective Joe Finch. The book digs into Finch's past while sending him into another violent Cooper investigation, where family history, local power, and a lurking cult make every lead more dangerous. Both Cooper novels are connected by place and atmosphere, but each follows a different investigator facing the town's particular kind of rot.

Later books widened the map. The Midnight King follows Nathan Cole as he returns home after his father's death and discovers evidence that forces him to face the serial killer his father really was. In The Night Watcher, Ashkanani begins an Edinburgh-set series led by private investigator Callie Munro, who takes on a case involving missing women and a predator operating in the city. The settings change, but the questions stay close: what people hide, what families carry, and how far someone will go when the systems meant to protect them fail.

Away from the page, Ashkanani works as a solicitor and co-hosts the writing podcast Page One. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, two sons, and dog, Scout.

He still knows that finishing a draft is its own small victory.