JD Kirk Audiobooks

JD Kirk is the working name of Barry Hutchison, a Scottish writer who spent years producing children’s fiction and comic science fiction before turning to crime in 2019. A Litter of Bones launched the DCI Jack Logan novels that year, self-published and set in the Highlands where Hutchison still lives with his family. The books found their readership remarkably fast.

Since then the series has run past twenty volumes and sold in the millions, spawning a spin-off that follows the gloriously unreformed Bob Hoon and won the Kindle Storyteller Award in 2024 for Stateside. Canelo took the Logan books into print publication the same year.

What makes Kirk unusual within tartan noir is tone. The procedural bones are sound and the crimes are bleak enough, but the dialogue is genuinely funny, the squad-room bickering is written as carefully as the investigation, and the Highland setting is treated as a working place rather than as scenery. More recently he has moved into psychological horror, and he has done it well.

The standout with us is Recall, an Audible Original and something of an event, since it is James McAvoy’s first full-length audiobook narration. A man survives a violent attack and begins seeing murders committed decades earlier by a killer known as the Tallyman, and the book keeps you unsure whether he is remembering or unravelling. Our listeners have given it top marks so far.

Its companion piece Him, read by David Tennant, came first and is the better place to start if you want Kirk’s horror-inflected side in order. Between them, the two explain why a crime novelist keeps attracting actors of that calibre.

For the procedural strand, Better the Devil brings DCI Logan and narrator Angus King, the voice regular readers know. Pick your mood and press play; it is all set out below.