About Rachel Bremner
Scottish crime fiction rooted in myth, landscape and the question that never leaves her alone. Author of The Crimson Keep
Rachel Bremner grew up making holiday pilgrimages to Aberdeenshire, where her grandparents lived.
The drive north — past Dundee, into the wide Angus skies, along the coastal road with the sea glinting to the east — felt like crossing into a different world.
The ruined castles. The cliff paths. The way the North Sea could be flat and silver one day and terrifying the next.
That coastline never really left her.
Rachel has always loved crime fiction. Not for the violence — she’d be the first to admit she reads a lot of it from behind a cushion — but for the puzzle at its heart.
For the way a good mystery holds up a mirror to the world and asks: what drives a person to the point where they tip over the line? What could make an ordinary human being do something monstrous?
These are questions that fascinate her, and they’re the questions she tries to answer, one book at a time.
The Crimson Keep is her debut novel, and the first in a series featuring DCI Surinder Taws — a detective who shares Rachel’s affection for the Aberdeenshire coast, her tendency to overthink things, and her habit of not quite letting things go when she should.
When she’s not writing, Rachel is at home in Scotland with her three children and three cats, all of whom have strong opinions about how her time should be spent.
What draws me to crime fiction.
I’ve loved crime novels for as long as I can remember. There’s something deeply satisfying about the structure of a mystery — the gathering of clues, the false turns, the moment everything clicks into place. It’s the most honest version of how the brain actually works.
But what really draws me in is the why. Not just how a crime was committed, but what made it possible. Every person who does something terrible was once an ordinary person who didn’t. Something changed. Something broke, or bent, or was pushed past its limit. I find that endlessly interesting — and a little terrifying — to explore.
The Aberdeenshire coast felt like the right setting from the start. It’s somewhere I’ve carried in my imagination since childhood — the cliffs, the haar, the old stones, the way history is so physically present you can almost feel it underfoot. It seemed like a place where ancient things and modern crimes could plausibly meet.
I hope Sindy’s world feels as real to you as it does to me.