AD Garrett Books in Order

AD Garrett is the pen name Margaret Murphy used for a trio of forensic thrillers, a strand of her work shaped by real crime scene expertise as well as her own background in science. The first two books were developed with forensic scientist Professor Dave Barclay, and the third with former CSI and policing lecturer Helen Pepper. That mix tells you a lot about what these novels do best: they care about evidence, procedure, and the messy human fallout that sits behind both.

Murphy was born and raised in Liverpool, and she studied Environmental Biology at the University of Liverpool before fiction became the day job. The science mattered. Long before AD Garrett existed, she was the kind of writer who wanted to know not just what happened in a case, but how people proved it, missed it, or got it wrong.

Before her first novel was published, she had already lived a few different working lives. She was a countryside ranger, taught biology, later moved into specialist support for dyslexic children, and was running a dyslexia unit on the Wirral when that first book came out. She has also taught creative writing and spent years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at universities across the north west of England.

She kept studying, too.

Later, Murphy completed a master's degree in Writing at Liverpool John Moores, lectured there for several years, helped found the touring crime group Murder Squad, and served as Chair of the Crime Writers' Association. None of that makes a novel work on its own, of course, but it does say something useful about her career: she has spent a long time close to both the craft and the working world of crime writing.

Murphy has often written about her interest in psychology, motive, and the way pressure changes people. That curiosity runs through her fiction. Even when the books lean hard into forensics, they never read like lab manuals in disguise. The science is there to sharpen the moral questions, not replace them. There is usually a family under strain, a child at risk, or an old mistake coming back round.

As AD Garrett, that approach becomes very clear in Everyone Lies, where DCI Kate Simms and Professor Nick Fennimore are forced back together by a case involving suspicious deaths in Manchester. Believe No One opens the canvas out to St Louis and Oklahoma, mixing cold cases, missing children, and a long-range serial murder investigation. Truth Will Out pulls the series even closer to the nerve, bringing abduction, old secrets, and Fennimore's family tragedy into the foreground. Readers who like these books usually mention the same things: the procedural detail feels solid, the stakes feel personal, and the relationship between Kate and Nick never settles into anything simple.

That tension is the point.

Murphy's wider work, including books such as Darkness Falls and Weaving Shadows, shows the same habits. She returns again and again to families under strain, children at risk, professionals under pressure, and institutions that would rather protect themselves than admit a mistake. Liverpool and the north west matter in her fiction, not as postcard backdrops but as places with history, class tension, and long memories. Even when the AD Garrett books travel to the American Midwest, the storytelling stays grounded in consequences rather than spectacle.

She has lived on the Wirral since 1989, has written under more than one name, and seems to enjoy the freedom that comes with a little shape-shifting. Underneath the different bylines, though, the through line is easy to spot: a sharp interest in how things work, a refusal to fake the science, and a real affection for characters who keep going even when their judgement has already cost them dearly.