A series by Raymond Stone
The DI Cormac Buchan Investigations
Six inverted mysteries, Columbo-style: you know, or all but know, the killer from the first page, and the pleasure is watching him get caught. Set in the villages, harbours and braes of North-East Scotland, with Detective Inspector Cormac Buchan, who never raises his voice, drives a Volvo the colour of cold tea, grows prize leeks, and wins every time by being underestimated.
Reading order
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Under the Haar
A Novel of Deeside
Sir Gregor Mowat, oil magnate turned philanthropist, is found dead beneath a ladder in his own walled garden on a soft Deeside morning. An old man, a wet rung, an unlucky fall. The county grieves and files it. Except that Sir...
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Slack Water
A Novel of the Broch
A hard frost, a dark quay, and a good man at the foot of the steps. Davie Buthlay went from the boats to the Fishermen's Mission, and for thirty years he has been the man the Broch's crews go to when the money runs out or the...
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The Judging Ring
A Novel of the Buchan Braes
On the eve of the New Deer Show, a young vet is found dead in the cattle pens, trampled by a bull with a famous temper. Everyone in the county knows that beast is dangerous. It says so in the show reports, year after year. The...
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Beneath the Moss
A Novel of Turclossie
A windfarm access road opens a peat moss that has kept its own counsel for centuries, and gives up a young man who has been lying there for forty-three years. In 1986 Tam Vasari went to Canada. The postcards said so. His...
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The Quiet Trade
A Novel of the Ugie
Ross Strathdee, junior partner of Mintlaw's third-generation undertakers, has run to Spain. He left a confession in his sent items and a hole in the pre-paid funeral fund the size of three hundred thousand pounds. The...
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The Leading Light
A Novel of Kinnaird Head
The last case. Walter Noble, seventy-nine, retired lighthouse service, spent his last years as a volunteer archivist, cataloguing a century and a half of keepers' logs so that the town could finally read its own weather. He is...