Murder in My Backyard

Its place in Inspector Ramsay

Murder in My Backyard is book 2 in the Inspector Ramsay series. It follows A Lesson in Dying. It is followed by A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy. See the full Inspector Ramsay reading order.

Stephen Ramsay is a police inspector working the fictional Northumberland town of Otterbridge, and Ann Cleeves's first police-procedural detective, introduced in 1990 while her Palmer-Jones series was still running. Ramsay is prickly, socially awkward, and quietly working through a difficult divorce across the six novels, and Cleeves uses him to dig into the close-knit, insular communities of North East England — villages and small towns where everyone has history with everyone else, a preoccupation that runs…