Abir Mukherjee Books in Order

If you want the full Raj-era detective story: A Rising Man → A Necessary Evil → Smoke and Ashes → Death in the East
If you want the later Wyndham and Banerjee novels: The Shadows of Men → The Burning Grounds
If you want a modern standalone thriller: Hunted
If you want a slick city-set murder story: The Pinnacle

Abir Mukherjee was born in London to Bengali parents whose roots are in Kolkata, and he spent most of his childhood in Glasgow. He has written about growing up in a house full of books, with English and Bengali stories sitting side by side on the shelves. That sense of living between cultures, Scottish on the outside, Bengali at home, would later shape much of what he chose to write about.

Crime fiction got to him early. As a teenager, a friend handed him Gorky Park, and the book stayed with him. What grabbed him was not just the mystery, but the idea of a decent person trying to do the right thing inside a broken system. You can feel that pull all through Mukherjee's work, where detectives are rarely free of politics, class, empire, or compromise.

Before publishing novels, he studied at the London School of Economics and built a career in accounting and finance. He wrote on and off for years, but by his own account he did not start writing seriously until he was around forty. Then came a turning point: he entered the opening pages of what became A Rising Man into the Harvill Secker and Daily Telegraph crime writing competition and won. The novel came out in 2016 and introduced Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee in a Calcutta still raw from war, nationalism, and colonial power.

That book changed things.

The Wyndham and Banerjee novels, including A Necessary Evil, Smoke and Ashes, Death in the East, The Shadows of Men, and The Burning Grounds, are historical mysteries, but they do not sit still in the past. Readers tend to come for the murder plots and stay for the pressure around them: the push and pull between British rule and Indian resistance, the friendship between Sam and Suren, and the way Kolkata, Assam, princely India, Bombay, and the wider country feel alive on the page. Mukherjee has said he was drawn to the Raj because it was a huge part of history that British schools barely taught him, while his family carried a very different memory of it at home.

He also moved into present-day thrillers. Hunted begins with a bombing and a desperate hunt for two missing young people, while The Pinnacle turns to Mumbai high-rise wealth, celebrity, and murder. Even when the setting changes, there is a clear through-line in his books: ordinary people trapped inside systems bigger than they are, trying to work out what decency looks like when the ground keeps shifting.

He became a full-time writer in 2020.

Mukherjee now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons, and he also co-hosts the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast with fellow novelist Vaseem Khan. His books have won major crime-writing awards, but the more useful thing to know is what kind of reading experience he offers. He likes strong plots, sharp turns, and moral mess. He is interested in history, but just as much in what power does to friendships, families, and loyalties. There is wit in the middle of the darkness too, especially in the back-and-forth between his lead characters. He often talks about writing in practical terms, as a craft, a job, and sometimes a cheaper version of therapy. That feels like a fair way into his fiction as well. The books entertain, but they keep asking awkward questions after the case is closed.