Alex Morrow Books in Order

Alex Morrow is a Glasgow police detective who never quite feels as if she belongs. She grew up on rough estates, has a half‑brother embedded in organised crime, and now runs major investigations while juggling twins and a strained marriage.

The series leans into that tension. Mina uses Morrow to explore how closely the city’s respectable institutions sit beside its criminal networks, and how often the same families, schools and streets feed both. Colleagues, witnesses and suspects frequently overlap, and Alex knows it.

In Still Midnight she is sidelined on what looks like a botched home invasion until a missing shopkeeper and a baffling ransom demand drag her back to the centre of the case. The End of the Wasp Season follows a brutal murder in an expensive suburb, played out against the shock waves of a banker’s suicide after the financial crash.

Gods and Beasts opens with an elderly man apparently helping a gunman rob a post office before being shot, sending Morrow into a tangle of dirty money and political favour‑trading. In The Red Road, a young businessman’s death leads her back to a notorious Glasgow housing complex and decisions made on the night Princess Diana died.

By Blood Salt Water, Alex is tracking a glamorous fraud suspect who vanishes from Glasgow and seems to reappear only as a corpse in a loch near the seaside town of Helensburgh. The investigation chips away at the shiny surface of a place desperate to seem respectable, exposing small‑time gangsters, guilty secrets and the limits of police power.

Structurally, the books move between Alex, offenders, victims and people on the margins, letting readers see how a crime ripples through homes, businesses and political offices. Mina is less interested in clever twists than in the small decisions that lead people to violence, cover‑ups or uneasy truces.

These aren’t puzzle‑box whodunits so much as dense, lived‑in crime stories about power, loyalty and the cost of compromise. Across the novels, Morrow grows into her role without ever becoming a tidy heroic archetype. She is prickly, often exhausted, and forever aware of how class, race and money shape every decision around her. Readers who like character‑driven police fiction, a strong sense of place and a streak of social anger will find a lot to hold onto in this series.