Ali Dawson Books in Order

The Ali Dawson novels are Elly Griffiths’ most overtly speculative crime books, blending police procedure with time travel and Victorian atmosphere. At their heart is Ali Dawson, a contemporary London detective who leads a small, secretive unit tasked with solving cases so cold that the only way to gather evidence is to go back and witness the past.

Ali works for a hush hush outfit tucked inside the government machine, known blandly as the Department of Logistics. In reality, her team uses experimental technology developed by a brilliant physicist to step into earlier decades and even centuries, walking the streets of history as if they were just another district on the tube map. The work is dangerous, tightly controlled and officially invisible.

In The Frozen People, Ali is asked to investigate rumours that an ancestor of a present day politician murdered several women in 1850s London. The family wants the record cleared, but others would prefer the story to stay buried. Ali travels back to a grim, freezing Victorian winter, rents a room in a house full of artists and finds a dead woman at her feet almost immediately. When her route home is cut off, she is stranded in the past while her teenage son Finn faces a linked accusation in the present.

The second book, The Killing Time, finds the unit grounded after a disastrous mission that left one colleague stuck in history. Restless with mundane desk work, Ali is drawn to a string of suspicious deaths in the present day, young men who have apparently jumped from high places after attending the show of a charismatic psychic. When a small, personal attempt to time travel goes wrong, she is thrown back into Victorian London again, tangled with old enemies and forced to weigh her duty to her son, her colleagues and the victims she is trying to protect.

Across the series, Griffiths plays with the usual pleasures of a crime novel – suspects, red herrings, interviews and reveals – while adding the extra tension of time running in two directions at once. Ali has to think about contamination of evidence, paradoxes and the ethics of changing a life that history says has already been lived. Victorian London is painted as crowded, filthy, creative and full of hidden networks, a place where an outsider woman detective must rely on quick wits and improvised cover stories.

For readers, the Ali Dawson books offer something slightly different from Griffiths’ other series: still character driven and often funny, but with a speculative twist, a strong emotional thread about parenthood and a constant question about what we choose to remember or forget from the past.