Books like The Chessmen by Peter May

Fin Macleod returns to his childhood Hebridean island to restore his family cottage and investigate a mysterious death entwined with hidden family secrets and a dangerous rival.

When a coastal dog retrieves a bone that turns out to be human, Isa Wilde’s idyllic village of Salten is thrust into terror as her childhood friends uncover a dark secret, unraveling their shared past.

Private investigator Lucas Davenport unravels a chilling summer cycle of murders that has plagued a Minnesota farmyard for years.

When a brutal murder on the Isle of Lewis mirrors a case Peter May’s Edinburgh detective Fin MacLeod solved two decades earlier, he must confront his past and uncover a link between the killings.

Glasgow’s underbelly is rocked when a small‑time heroin dealer is found dead, forcing a detective and an aspiring actress/private‑investigator to chase tangled clues and a missing mentor.

A detective solves a series of crimes in Braikie, a Highland town hit hard by the recession.

"I very much need to be dead." These are the chilling last words left by a man who had everything to live for but took his own life. In the void that remains stands his widow, FBI agent Jane Hawk, surrounded by questions destined to go unanswered unless she does what all the grief and fury inside her demand: Find the truth, no matter what. People of talent and accomplishment, people seemingly happy and sound of mind, have recently been committing suicide in surprising numbers. A disturbing pattern is beginning to emerge. Jane is determined to give up everything to find out why. And if that means going rogue and becoming America's Most Wanted, then so be it. Those arrayed against her are legion, and devoted to protecting something profoundly important-or terrifying-enough to exterminate any and all in their way. But Jane is as clever as these enemies are cold-blooded, as relentless as they are ruthless. And she is driven by a righteous rage they can never comprehend. Because it is born of love.

In the Shetland Isles, inspector Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves investigate the mysterious disappearance and subsequent death of friend Eleanor, whose obsession with a local ghost may hide a decades‑old secret worth killing for.

Detective Chief Inspector Blair plots to remove Hamlet’s loyal Sergeant Hamish Macbeth from Lochdubh, but after Cyril Sessions is murdered, Macbeth becomes the main suspect in a tense Scottish police investigation.