Crime novels set in Britain, away from London. Where each one happens, and what happens in it.
Black and Blue
Ian Rankin, 1997, Orion. CWA Gold Dagger 1997. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Inspector John Rebus works the murder of Allan Mitchison, an off-duty oil worker, while an internal corruption inquiry runs against him and a copycat the papers call Johnny Bible starts killing.
Nineteen Seventy-Four
David Peace, 1999, Serpent's Tail. Leeds and the West Riding. Edward Dunford, a new crime correspondent, covers the murder of a girl called Clare Kemplay and keeps going after it, into a police force and a property business that would both rather he stopped.
Black Dog
Stephen Booth, 2000, HarperCollins. The Peak District. Fifteen-year-old Laura Vernon is found in woodland. DC Ben Cooper, who is local, is paired with DC Diane Fry, who is not. They start on Harry Dickinson, the retired miner whose dog found her shoe.
The Crossing Places
Elly Griffiths, 2009, Quercus. The Norfolk saltmarshes. DCI Harry Nelson asks the forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway to look at bones found on a beach. They turn out to be an Iron Age burial and not the missing child Lucy Downey, and then Ruth starts getting letters.
Rubbernecker
Belinda Bauer, 2013, Bantam Press. Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2014. Cardiff. Patrick Fort, an anatomy student, is dissecting a cadaver when he notices the man did not die the way the paperwork says. On a neurological ward elsewhere in the hospital, Sam Galen is awake inside a coma.
The Botanist
M. W. Craven, 2022, Constable. Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2023. Cumbria and Carlisle. Someone is sending pressed flowers to public figures and then poisoning them in rooms nobody could have entered. DS Washington Poe also has to deal with his friend Estelle Doyle being arrested for shooting her father.
The Rising Tide
Ann Cleeves, 2022, Macmillan. Holy Island, Northumberland. A group of old friends hold their usual reunion and Rick Kelsall, a television presenter with a ruined reputation, is found hanged. The tide comes in and DI Vera Stanhope questions them all with nobody able to leave.
Past Lying
Val McDermid, 2023, Little, Brown. Edinburgh. A student called Lara Hardie goes missing, and an unfinished manuscript by the dead crime writer Jake Stein describes the case in detail. DCI Karen Pirie works back through Stein's feud with another novelist to find out who read it.
Janus Origin: Threads of Control
Daniel A. Riddle, 2025. Paperback ISBN 1068476303, £12.99. Preston. It opens in a café on the Flag Market, looking across at the museum, on a wet October morning twenty minutes before the rush.
Three I left out. The Thursday Murder Club is set in Kent but the Kent in it is comfortable. Slow Horses is a fine book and is entirely London. The Appeal takes place in a town called Lower Lockwood, which is not anywhere.
