Graeme Macrae Burnet Books In Order

Publication Order of Georges Gorski Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet is one of the brightest literary talents in all of Scotland. On his mom’s side, he has family ties to the northwest Highlands.

He was born and raised in Kilmarnock, and spent a few years working as an English teacher in Porto, Prague, London, and Bordeaux, before he came back to Glasgow and worked for eight years for various independent television companies.

Graeme has degrees in International Security Studies and English Literature from St. Andrews and Glasgow universities respectively.

“His Bloody Project” won the Vrij Nederland Thriller of Year Award in 2017 and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year in 2016. The novel was also shortlisted for the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year 2017, the European Crime Fiction Prize 2017, and the Man Booker Prize in 2016. “The Accident on the A35” and was longlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2018. “Case Study” was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize.

“The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau” is the first novel in the “Inspector Gorski Investigation” series and was released in 2014. Manfred Baumann is a loner. Perpetually ill at ease and socially awkward, he spends most evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the alluring yet sullen waitress at this drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint Louis.

One day, she just disappears into thin air and Georges Gorski, a detective that is still haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, gets called in to investigate the girl’s disappearance. And he sets his sights on Manfred.

While Manfred cowers under Gorski’s watchful eye, dark secrets from his past start catching up with him and carefully crafted facade of normalcy starts cracking.

Graeme’s masterful play on literary form featuring an unreliable narrator makes for a grimly entertaining psychological thriller which questions if it is possible, or even desirable, to know the mind of another man.

Readers found this to be bleakly funny, clever, and playful; Graeme delivers a novel which has all the makings of a cult classic. He creates true noir in the funny, mysterious, and intelligent “The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau”. This is a brilliantly crafted novel, it’s a thriller which exudes French sophistication and class and is a psychological thriller which comes with an incredibly dark twist. It is thoroughly satisfying and very accessible read the entire way through.

“The Accident on the A35” is the second novel in the “Inspector Gorski Investigation” series and was released in 2017. The methodical yet troubled Chief Inspector Georges Gorski visits the wife of this lawyer that was killed in a road accident, the accident on the A35. It’s an unremarkable case, and the visit is just a routine one.

Mme Barthelme, who is alluring and seems unmoved by this news, has got a single question: where was her husband the night of this accident? The answer to her question may change nothing, however it might change it all. And Gorski sets a course for what could only be a painful truth.

Yet the dead guy’s reticent son is looking for answers, too. And his search is going to have much more devastating repercussions.

Graeme delivers an immensely satisfying literary thriller, one that is subtly observed, extremely droll, and psychologically acute. This is an unflashy yet still highly accomplished read, and works on several levels, as it reads like an intelligent, well plotted, lavishly detailed, and unsimple Simenon.

“His Bloody Project” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2015. The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in an isolated community in the Scottish Highlands leads to a young man’s arrest. A memoir written by Roderick Macrae, the accused, makes it obvious he is in fact guilty however it calls to the country’s finest psychiatric and legal minds to figure out what pushed him to commit such merciless acts of violence.

Was he actually made? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between the gallows and Macrae.

Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an original and irresistible story about the provincial nature of the truth, even when the facts seem obvious. This is a mesmerizing literary thriller that is set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.

Graeme brilliantly seats the reader as the detective on the gruesome and savage gouging and killings. Readers loved every moment they spent with this book. The narrative evokes dark clouds covering a grim community filled with poverty, in the laird, the church, the weather, the small crofts, tattered clothes, and one rampaging bully set to suit himself in the way of a teen lady; it is the type of story that gets deep under your skin. And right when you believe that you have things all figured out, you get cold cocked with a vital clue, yet still blusters with black humor.

“Case Study” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2021. London in 1965. One unworldly young woman believes a charismatic psychotherapist, named Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. She assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, intent on proving her suspicions, and records her experiences in a series of notebooks. However she quickly finds herself being drawn into a world in which she can’t be certain of anything any longer. Even of her own character.

Graeme presents her notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is this dazzling (and often wickedly humorous) meditation on the nature of identity, sanity, and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing these days.

Graeme pulls off a rare feat in writing two parallel narratives which are equally compelling and interesting. Braithwaite, even though he’s a repugnant character, is palpably charismatic. Rebecca is likable and charming in spite of (sometimes perhaps sometimes because of) her judgmental nature and her tendency to fantasize. The slow unfurling of her true nature is delectable.