The Highlands Noir of Inverness

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The city of the Highlands, located on Scotland’s dramatic northeast coast, where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth. 65,000 or so folk but apparently one of northern Europe’s fastest growing cities that gets consistently ranked in the top five UK cities for quality of life. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a few murders to write about though in this northeastern outpost of Tartan Noir….

GR Halliday’s trilogy features Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy. In book one, From the Shadows (2019), Kennedy teams up with Inverness-based social worker Michael Bach. Sixteen-year-old Robert arrives home late. Without a word to his dad, he goes up to his bedroom. Robert is never seen alive again. A body is soon found on the coast of the Scottish Highlands. Then another boy goes missing….

DI Kennedy is back in Dark Waters (2020) where tourists to the Highlands seem to be getting abducted. Meanwhile Monica has been called from Inverness to her first Serious Crimes case in six months – a dismembered body has been discovered, abandoned in a dam. A killer is on the loose in the Highlands. And finally, in Under the Marsh (2022) Kennedy receives a call to visit Pauline Tosh in the remote Highlands Carselang prison. Twelve years ago Kennedy caught Tosh, a serial killer and sent her to prison for life. In the jail Tosh hands Monica a hand-drawn map with a cross marking the desolate marsh lands near Inverness and other bodies. 

JD Kirk’s Detective Chief Inspector Jack Logan series (19 books in total) also takes place in and around Inverness and that part of the Highlands and are all steeped in Highland locations and famous sites. We’ll focus on the 14th book in the series City of Scars (2022) where Logan tracks a sadistic killer who begins picking off victims on the streets of Inverness. The body count grows alarmingly fast, Logan is getting nowhere while his personal life is taking a beating. Some nice atmospherics around Inverness and its back streets. 

Margaret Kirk writes ‘Highland Noir’ Scottish crime fiction in the DI Lukas Mahler trilogy, all set in and around her hometown of Inverness. Her debut novel, Shadow Man, won the Good Housekeeping First Novel Competition in 2016 and comes highly recommended by any number of the luminaries of the Tartan/|Highland noir scene (Val McDermid et al). Shadow Man (2016) introduces ex-ex-London Metropolitan police Detective Inspector Lukas Mahler, now based out of Inverness. The day before her wedding the queen of Scottish daytime TV is found murdered. On the other side of Inverness, police informant Kevin Ramsay is killed in a gangland-style execution. Are the two killings related and is the Inverness underworld involved? Mahler is back in What Lies Buried (2019) – an abducted local kid and the discovery of human remains on a construction site near Inverness which reignites a cold case from the 1940s. And lastly, In the Blood (2021) a corpse in Orkney, a cluster of islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland leads back to a case Mahler handled back in his London days with the Met Police. 

Helen Forbes is another Inverness based crime writer and sets her Detective Sergeant Joe Galbraith series in her hometown. Shadow of the Hill (2014) starts in Inverness where an elderly woman is found battered to death in the common stairwell of an Inverness apartment building. But then the investigation spreads across Scotland as far as the Hebridean island of Harris, where Galbraith spent his childhood. Galbraith returns in Madness Lies (2017) with a murder in the centre of Inverness in broad daylight. It’s a high-profile case – such a random act of violence rarely seen in the city and, in this case, a high-profile Inverness city Councillor. Everyone tells Galbraith he had no enemies, but someone clearly wanted him dead. The action roams across Inverness with side trips to the Hebridean island of North Uist and down to London.

One more contemporary Inverness novel. And this one from Scottish Tartan Noir legend Christopher Brookmyre, best known perhaps for his Jack Parlabane novels. Parlabane is an investigative journalist who, in order to do his job as he sees it, is not above breaking a few trespassing and burglary laws. In Black Widow, the seventh Paralbane book, Jack is investigating an Inverness surgeon suspected of her husband’s murder following a car accident in the Highlands. Black Widow was the Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2016, an award now named after the late and very great Scottish crime writer (and generally regarded as the founding father of Tartan Noir) William McIlvanney. 

And finally, SG Maclean is an Inverness writer who has written a brilliant historical mystery, The Bookseller of Inverness (2022). It’s worth laying out the plot in some detail for those not necessarily au fait with Scottish eighteenth century history. After the Battle of Culloden (the final confrontation of the Jacobite rising of 1745), Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he’s searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night. The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him – a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for – and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.

The Bookseller of Inverness is a great historical crime novel that takes you into old Inverness and a deep dive of Scottish history too. Perhaps the ideal place to start reading about the capital of the Highlands. And perhaps finally, finally…. As we mentioned Culloden…Douglas Skelton’s The Blood is Still (2020) should get a mention. When the body of a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is discovered on the site of the Battle of Culloden, journalist Rebecca Connolly takes up the story for her newspaper. Meanwhile, a film being made about the 1745 Rebellion has enraged the right-wing group Spirit of the Gael which is connected to a shadowy group called Black Dawn linked to death threats and fake anthrax deliveries to Downing Street and Holyrood (the Scottish parliament building). When a second body – this time in the Redcoat uniform of the government army – is found in Inverness, Rebecca finds herself drawn ever deeper into the mystery.

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