Book Fifteen in the Inspector McLean series
July 2026
Festival season. The streets are filled to bursting with tourists, and Edinburgh is gripped by a stifling heatwave. Not the best time for one of the most violent murders the city has witnessed in years.
The victim of the murder cannot be identified; its brutal nature of the shocking both the public and the police. What could possibly have inflicted such gruesome injuries? Was it a wild animal on the loose, or the beginning of some horrific gang warfare?
Another body is found on Musselburgh Beach: naked, comatose . . . but this time still alive. DI Tony McLean can’t shake the feeling that there is a connection to the killing – but there are few leads for him and the team to go by.
The police are at a loss, and the city is on edge – will the killer strike again?
UK Print Blackwells Amazon Waterstones Hive Bookshop.org
15 books
Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean, formerly of Lothian and Borders Police, now Police Scotland in Edinburgh, is the kind of policeman who gets all the weird cases. He began life as a support character in a comic script I wrote on spec for 2000AD in the very early 1990s. I used him in a few other stories whenever I needed a policeman, until finally promoting him to lead actor in Natural Causes.
3 books
Detective Constable Constance ‘Con’ Fairchild is not your average London cop. Born to the aristocratic Fairchild family, she has nevertheless cut all ties with them and forged a life for herself in the city. Family ties are strong though, and not so easily broken.
As the cunningly disguised J D Oswald
5 books
The Ballad of Sir Benfro is the five part epic tale of young Benfro, the first male dragon to be hatched in a thousand years, into a world where his kind have been hunted by men to the brink of extinction.
1 book
Dark Shadows Hide The Deepest Secrets
Currently my only published standalone novel. Hopefully not my last. All the details you could possibly want about it are here.
OK, so I need to put a little something in here for you curious folk out there. Not curious as in odd, of course. Curious as in the dead cat. Mind you, you may be odd. Probably not dead though.
I’m James Oswald, author of some twenty-three published novels and many others that will likely never see the light of day.
You can find out more about me here, including links to interviews and other publicity material.
With my other hat on (and my wellies and raincoat more often than not), I run a 350 acre livestock farm in North East Fife.
I used to raise pure bred New Zealand Romney sheep, but the pressure of writing work made that unsustainable. Now I concentrate solely on my pedigree fold of Highland cattle. If I ever get the time, I’ll add farm pages to this website, but for now you’ll find a few videos of them at my youtube channel
I occasionally give forth on matters to do with writing, farming and a great many other things. You’ll find all that nonsense here.
I’ve had a few contacts via the form on this website in recent weeks, from people – other writers mostly – who have received emails that claim to be from me, complimenting them on their work and looking for further ‘conversation’. These emails almost always come from a gmail account, and I know at least one was joswaldwriter@gmail.com. Easy to think that might really be me, but let me assure you all it is not.
A couple of things collided in my attention this week and formed a proto-thought about ‘AI’ I thought I’d share here. I always put ‘AI’ in quote marks, by the way, because it’s an acronym that stands for so many different and disparate things it might as well stand for nothing. But that’s a post for another time, maybe.
Sad news at the farm as we say goodbye to Dogmael, the tricoloured sort-of sheepdog. He had a minor stroke last week and died in his sleep on Saturday afternoon at the grand old age of fourteen and a half.
A free book? That you can read? I am too good for you all.
Originally serialised during the first COVID lockdown to help people while away those endless hours. This isn’t quite good enough to submit to a publisher, or at least I don’t think it is. I wrote it the best part of twenty years ago, so it may have dated a little. Check it out here, if you’re interested.
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