Jana Kippo
literary crime
Series · crime fiction
Allie Burns
The Allie Burns series by Val McDermid has 2 known books (2 published) and is best read in publication order, starting with 1979 (2021).
- Books
- 2 known books (2 novels)
- Published
- 2
- First published
- 2021
- Status
- ongoing
- Shelved under
- Mystery & Crime
- Last checked
Start here: 1979 (2021) — then read straight through in publication order.
Reading order
The date order of published books and any announced future entries — the default way to read the series.
- Book 1:
1979
Val McDermid opened her decade-spanning Allie Burns series in 2021 with 1979, following a young Scottish journalist fighting for bylines at a Glasgow paper on the eve of Thatcherism as she stumbles onto a drug-trafficking and political-corruption story nobody wants published.
Alternative text for cover: Cover of 1979 - Book 2:
1989
1989 picks Allie's career up a decade later exactly as its title promises, running 448 pages -- well over the first book's 320 -- as she's pulled into the AIDS crisis and the Eastern Bloc's collapse.
Alternative text for cover: Cover of 1989
About the Allie Burns series
Val McDermid's newest series follows Allie Burns, a young Scottish journalist breaking into a newsroom that doesn't want her there, across a planned run of decade-spaced novels that double as a history of British investigative journalism from the late 1970s onward. 1979 opens with Allie fighting for bylines at a Glasgow paper on the eve of Thatcherism and stumbling into a story about drug trafficking and political corruption that nobody wants published; 1989 picks her up a decade later, further into her career and into the AIDS crisis and Eastern Bloc collapse, still chasing stories the establishment would rather bury.
McDermid has said the series is conceived as a sequence moving forward roughly one book per decade -- 1979, 1989, and onward -- using Allie's career as a lens on how journalism, and the crimes it uncovers, changed across the decades McDermid herself lived through as a working journalist before turning to fiction. It's her most overtly autobiographical crime series to date, drawing directly on her own start in Fleet Street and Scottish newsrooms.
Frequently asked questions
How many Allie Burns books are there?
Two published so far: 1979 (2021) and 1989 (2022). McDermid has described the series as an ongoing decade-by-decade sequence, but no further installment had a confirmed publication date as of this curation (August 2026).
Is Allie Burns connected to Val McDermid's other series?
No -- it's an independent series with its own cast, though it draws on McDermid's own journalism background the way her other series draw on crime reporting and forensic psychology.
What's the series' concept?
Each novel follows journalist Allie Burns roughly a decade further into her career, using her as a lens on a different moment in recent British history -- starting with 1979's dawn of Thatcherism.
If you like the Allie Burns series
Reading order last verified .