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Home / Series / Detective Watters Mysteries

Series

Detective Watters Mysteries

The Detective Watters Mysteries are set principally in Dundee during the 1860s and 1870s, as Sergeant and later Inspector George Watters investigates crimes arising from the city’s mills, docks, lodging houses, shops and respectable drawing rooms. Cases involving arson, murder, burglary, kidnapping and railway theft repeatedly reveal connections between local violence and wider imperial or European politics.

The series combines police procedural detail with a close portrait of an industrial Scottish city. Watters and his colleagues work without modern forensic technology, relying on informants, interviews and knowledge of neighbourhoods divided by occupation, religion, wealth and reputation. London, Lochee and Broughty Ferry broaden the setting without displacing Dundee as the centre of the sequence.

Reading order

Books in this series (7 books)

A Carriage for Lochee cover

#6 – A Carriage for Lochee

Malcolm Archibald

Sergeant George Watters is already occupied with illegal drinking dens in Dundee and Lochee when an influential merchant reports a murder and the theft of a carriage. The inquiry leads Watters and Detective Scuddamore among travelling families, Russian dissidents and memories of an unresolved incident from…

The Broughty Ferry Murder cover

#7 – The Broughty Ferry Murder

Malcolm Archibald

Dundee, 1870. Now an inspector, George Watters is ordered to investigate a railway robbery whose consequences reach toward Broughty Ferry and a new murder. The expansion of rail travel gives criminals speed and anonymity, while commercial pressure and official expectations make a quick solution politically desirable.…