About
Who is Ed James?
His latest series is set in the Scottish Borders, where Ed now lives, starring DI Rob Marshall – a criminal profiler turned detective, investigating serial murders in a beautiful landscape.
Set four hundred miles south on the gritty streets of East London, his bestselling DI Fenchurch series features a cop with little to lose and a kidnapped daughter to find.
His Police Scotland books are fronted by multiple detectives based in Edinburgh, including Scott Cullen, a young Edinburgh Detective investigating crimes from the bottom rung of the career ladder he’s desperate to climb, and Craig Hunter, a detective shoved back into uniform who struggles to overcome his PTSD from his time in the army.
Putting Dundee on the tartan noir map, the DS Vicky Dodds books feature a driven female detective struggling to combine her complex home life with a heavy caseload.
Formerly an IT project manager, Ed filled his weekly commute to London by writing on planes, trains and automobiles. He now writes full-time and lives in the Scottish Borders with a menagerie of rescued animals.
Newsletter
Sign up to Ed’s regular-ish newsletter to get an email every time he’s got something on preorder or release. He drops a free novella every so often, such as FALSE START, a prequel to the Marshall books, and CUDDLY TOY, a 20,000 word story starring Craig Hunter. Click the link below to sign up:
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. When is your next book coming out?
A. This is always changing. Few ways to keep up with it: this site for starters, subscribe to my regular newsletter, or you can follow me on Facebook, Threads and Instagram, but while I have an account I don’t use Twitter for obvious reasons.
Q. How do I contact you?
A. It’s all over here at my contact page. Email is usually best — I reply to every email so if I haven’t replied to you then something technical has gone wrong.
If it’s urgent, hit me up on Facebook.
Q. Are your books available in audiobook?
A. The DI Rob Marshall (Scottish Borders), DI Simon Fenchurch (East London) and Vicky Dodds (Dundee) books are all available on Audible, narrated by Angus King.
The Police Scotland books will be added from summer 2025, including a new book 10, entitled THE LOST.
All future releases will come out on the same date as ebook and paperback, subject to it getting through their approval pipeline.
Q. Have any of your books been turned into film or tv?
A. Not yet. If you’re a film/TV producer or agent, contact me.
Q. Love your covers! Who is your cover designer?
A. Me. I do all of my covers.
I’ve used Mike Clark‘s photos for the last few and they’re great.
Q. Who handles the ebook and print formatting for your self-published titles?
A. Me. I use Vellum to output lovely Kindle and paperback files. It’s brilliant.
Q. In what order should I read your books?
A. Have a look at the series reading order page. They were a bit messy, but I tidied the series up so they’re more streamlined now. The Police Scotland books contain what was previously the Cullen, Hunter and Cullen & Bain series. The only hard continuity with them is with the Vicky Dodds books, which has an overlap with Fenchurch. But if you read them all in the order on that page, it’ll all make sense.
The Rob Marshall books are separate from them – for Marvel heads, they don’t exist in the same universe. Yet, anyway!
Q. Will you write another Cullen novel?
A. Not sure. I think “The Dead End” has a nice bookend to the series, but never say never.
Q. Why are your ebooks only available on Kindle?
A. I tried selling on other channels, e.g. Nook/Kobo/iBooks, and nobody bought them. Amazon’s KDP gives you lots of benefits for going exclusive, and it works for me. My books are DRM-free so the files can be bought on the Kindle Store and transferred to any e-reading device using cables and stuff. Really easy, even my dad can do it.