AL Fraine Books in Order

If you want Kate O'Connell from the beginning: First Hand → The Upper Hand → Idle Hands
If you want a team-based Surrey police thriller: Axe to Grind → A Tangled Web → Secrets of the Dead
If you want darker Nottinghamshire investigations: In Bad Faith → Hell To Pay
If you want the earliest crossover backstory: The Doll Killer → Axe to Grind → In Bad Faith

AL Fraine is the crime-writing name used by Andrew Dobell, a British novelist and visual artist whose police thrillers move between Surrey and Nottinghamshire. Under this name he writes fast, tense investigations that stay close to the detectives doing the work. The murders can be brutal, but the books are just as interested in pressure, loyalty, and what the job does to the people stuck inside it.

Long before the crime novels, art was the main thread. From a young age Dobell wanted to draw comics, and he studied art and illustration while also picking up photography. On a university trip to New York he even visited the Kubert School, was accepted, and seriously looked at that route before life pulled him somewhere else.

Art came first.

He went on to work in commercial illustration, photography, digital art, and cover design. Over time he built a career creating images for products, publishers, and authors, and he has spoken about using Photoshop since the 1990s. He also spent years around photography jobs and compositing work, learning how much mood can change with one small visual choice. That background matters. His crime novels often open with a strong image and move with the clean, scene-by-scene rhythm of someone who can already see the shot in his head.

Writing came out of a long love of thrillers and tense screen drama. After years of reading and watching the genre, a couple of newer shows gave him the final nudge to sit down and write his first thriller, The Upper Hand. That book introduced DC Kate O'Connell and set the tone for much of what followed, police work under pressure, dark crimes in ordinary English settings, and personal history that will not stay buried. Kate is driven, capable, and carrying old grief, which became a pattern for several of Fraine's best leads.

That first novel opened the door.

In Idle Hands and Out of Hand, Kate O'Connell and Nathan Halliwell investigate kidnappings, staged murders, and cases with an occult edge. Axe to Grind then broadens the canvas by bringing in DCI Jon Pilgrim and a fuller team setup, while The Doll Killer adds an earlier piece of the same world. Fraine likes linked books. Different leads step forward, but the sense of danger, moral strain, and unfinished business carries across the series. Readers who enjoy these novels often talk about the pace, the team tension, and the way private history keeps leaking into official business.

Then the focus shifts north. In Bad Faith and Hell To Pay move into Rob Loxley's Nottinghamshire, where the cases feel rougher at the edges and the setting does a lot of work. Loxley is a detective who has had to fight for his place, and that pressure follows him into every case. Sherwood Forest, old mining towns, housing estates, quiet roads that stop feeling safe, these places are not just backdrop. They shape the mood. They shape the danger. They also help explain why the books feel grounded even when the crimes are especially strange or vicious.

Across the AL Fraine books, a few things keep turning up. Detectives are tested by the job and by what came before it. Institutions do not always help. Seemingly decent communities are hiding rot, and old secrets have a habit of resurfacing beside fresh bodies. The books are dark, but they are built to move. There is usually a clear hook, a tight investigation, some dry team banter, and just enough ongoing story to make the next book hard to resist.

Dobell also writes outside crime under his own name, and he still works as a professional illustrator and cover artist. He has said he loves cinema and genre fiction, which fits neatly with the way these novels are put together. He lives in Surrey, just outside London, with his wife, children, a cat, and a dog.