Ann Cleeves Books in Order

Having moved from Shetland to Orkney, Willow Reeves and Jimmy Perez rent a cottage on a farmer’s land while their new home is finished. When a woman arrives to visit the elderly farmer and her story doesn’t quite add up, Willow’s instincts tell her that this late‑in‑life romance may hide something darker.

When the body of a care‑home worker is found near Rosebank, a home for troubled teens, Vera Stanhope’s only obvious lead is the disappearance of fourteen‑year‑old resident Chloe Spence. A second body near the Three Dark Wives monument deepens the mystery, blending folklore, failed care and buried community shame.

Legendary sailor Jem Rosco blows back into Greystone, a Devon village Matthew Venn once knew as a child, then vanishes during a fierce storm. His body is later found in a dinghy anchored off a treacherous cove, and Matthew must investigate as bad weather cuts the village off from the outside world.

A rare day off tempts DCI Vera Stanhope across the causeway to Holy Island for crab sandwiches, but the trip stirs memories of an earlier visit as a teenager, when she secretly watched her father meet a mysterious woman and took her first steps toward becoming a detective.

For fifty years, a group of friends have reunited on Holy Island, bonded by a school trip and an old tragedy on the tidal causeway. When one of them is found hanged during the latest gathering, Vera Stanhope suspects murder and digs into decades of guilt, betrayals and long‑buried secrets.

From his kitchen window in North Devon, DI Matthew Venn spots two young girls standing alone on the winter beach, hand in hand. When he goes to check on them, he discovers sisters carrying secrets that could put them in danger if he cannot work out what they’re hiding.

A rare hot summer brings tourists to North Devon as Matthew Venn is called to a rural artists’ compound, where a respected public servant has been stabbed with a shard of his daughter’s glasswork. When a second similar death follows, Matthew must untangle lies spreading through his close‑knit community.

Driving home through a blizzard, Vera Stanhope finds an abandoned car with a toddler inside and no sign of the driver. Seeking shelter at Brockburn, her estranged family’s crumbling estate, she soon discovers a murdered young woman in the snow and a tangle of country‑house secrets.

Enjoying a rare day off, Vera Stanhope ducks into a new bookshop inside a converted chapel just as a skeleton is discovered in the old baptismal font. A decade‑old disappearance resurfaces, and Vera must untangle relationships around the shop before the trail goes cold again.

Back in North Devon for his estranged father’s funeral, DI Matthew Venn is drawn into a murder investigation when a man with an albatross tattoo is found stabbed on a nearby beach. The case pulls Matthew toward the evangelical community that rejected him and threatens the new life he has built.

An English family move to Shetland hoping its quiet will help their autistic son, but gossip erupts when their young nanny is found hanging in their barn. As rumours of an affair spread, Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves dig into the neighbours’ grudges and the family’s own buried tensions.

A visit to prison brings Vera Stanhope face to face with John Brace, a disgraced former detective she helped put away. Brace offers information about a missing wheeler‑dealer in exchange for help for his family, sending Vera back to Whitley Bay and into her late father’s murky past.

In the Scottish Borders village of Stonebridge, young teacher Anna Blackwell is found dead and police lean toward suicide or accident. Jimmy Perez is asked by his ex‑wife to look again, probing rumours about her new husband, a missing child’s future and a death that may be murder.

In this playful short story from an anthology honouring crime writer Peter Lovesey, an ex‑pat wife stuck in a life of dull dinner parties becomes obsessed with meeting her favourite author at a literary festival—and considers drastic steps when her husband threatens to ruin the plan.

During the funeral of Magnus Tait, torrential rain triggers a landslide that tears through a supposedly empty Shetland croft. Among the wreckage Jimmy Perez finds the body of an unknown woman in a red dress, and learns she was dead before the mud hit, leading to a chilling investigation into her hidden life.

In the seemingly perfect Valley Farm development, a young house‑sitter employed by wealthy owners is found dead beside a lane. A second body appears in the attic, both men linked by an obsession with moths, drawing Vera into a claustrophobic world of hobbyists and neighbours with much to hide.

This illustrated companion to the Shetland novels guides readers through a year on the islands, exploring their history, festivals, wildlife and dramatic landscapes and showing how the archipelago’s changing seasons shape everyday life as well as Jimmy Perez’s cases.

A group of old university friends travel to Unst, Shetland’s most northerly island, for a wedding. After claiming to see the ghost of a drowned child, one woman vanishes into the mist; her body later appears in a loch, and Perez and Willow must separate legend from motive.

On a snowbound Metro train in Newcastle, Joe Ashworth’s daughter notices an elderly woman left sitting after everyone else has stepped off. Margaret Krukowski is dead, and Vera Stanhope’s search for answers leads to Harbour Street, a tight community guarding painful wartime and family secrets.

When a journalist returns to Shetland to dig into a controversial story and is found dead, an outsider detective, Willow Reeves, is sent to lead the case. Jimmy Perez, still grieving, is drawn back into policing as they explore old scandals and new resentments on the islands.

When one of her bohemian neighbours vanishes, Vera Stanhope traces her to a writers’ retreat in a country house. A literary guru is soon found stabbed, and Vera must investigate a closed circle of ambitious authors while her neighbour becomes the prime suspect.

After forcing herself to the gym, Vera Stanhope discovers a woman’s body in the sauna, first assuming natural causes. Ligature marks prove otherwise, pulling Vera into a case involving social services, a notorious child‑protection scandal and long memories of a ruined life.

Jimmy Perez takes his fiancée to his home island of Fair Isle, where a bird observatory packed with visiting twitchers is lashed by storms. Cut off from the mainland, the guests are trapped together when a celebrated ornithologist is murdered, forcing Perez to hunt a killer among people he knows too well.

On a small Shetland island, an archaeology dig uncovers human remains that may be centuries old—or not. When an elderly woman is fatally shot soon after, Jimmy Perez must decide whether the past has come violently into the present or someone is using history as a smokescreen.

During the Shetland “white nights,” when darkness barely falls, an exhibition at a remote gallery is disrupted by a stranger who breaks down in tears and claims not to know his own name. Next day he is found hanged in a boathouse, and Perez has to navigate artists, family ties and midsummer madness to understand why.

On a sweltering Northumberland summer night, a teen boy is found strangled, laid in a bath of water and strewn with wild flowers. When a similar tableau appears, Vera Stanhope hunts an artistically minded killer obsessed with turning murder into spectacle.

On a snowy New Year’s Day in Shetland, an artist finds the body of a teenage girl lying in a field, ravens circling overhead. Suspicion falls on a lonely outcast, but Inspector Jimmy Perez must look beyond village gossip to uncover the killer within the close community.

Ten years after Jeanie Long was jailed for the murder of teenager Abigail Mantel, new evidence proves her innocence. As the village reopens old wounds, Vera Stanhope digs into buried secrets and jealousies to find the real killer still living among them.

Lizzie Bartholomew escapes a difficult past in Northumberland with a solo trip to Morocco, enjoying a brief affair with a fellow traveller. Back home she learns he has died and left her money in his will—with unsettling conditions that force her to confront dangerous truths about his life and her own history.

Detective Peter Porteous is called when a teenage boy’s body is recovered from Cranwell Lake, likely missing since the early 1970s. News of the discovery shocks prison officer Hannah Morton, once the boy’s girlfriend, and old secrets resurface as past and present collide around the unsolved disappearance.

Three women gather in remote Northumberland to complete an environmental survey, only for a local friend to be found dead in an apparent suicide. When a second death follows, DI Vera Stanhope must unravel old betrayals hidden within the team.

Fifteen-year-old Marilyn Howe turns up on Inspector Ramsay’s doorstep in distress, convinced her mother has vanished. Returned home, she seems mistaken—until months later her mother truly disappears and a body washes up on the Headland’s shore, drawing Ramsay into the claustrophobic lives of an isolated coastal community.

Old university friends Rob, Oliver and Mick reunite on a birding tour to High Island on the Upper Texas coast, two decades after an earlier fateful trip. When Mick is found dead during a storm, George and Molly Palmer‑Jones follow a trail from a small fraud case in Britain to the migration hotspot.

When elderly farmer Ernie Bowles is found strangled in his kitchen, Inspector Stephen Ramsay senses a case more complex than a burglary gone wrong. A second suspicious death, then a third, lead him to an alternative therapy centre where charm, money and belief mask dangerous currents.

When environmental campaigner James Morrissey is found dead and his long‑awaited autobiography goes missing, his wife Meg refuses to believe he took his own life. George and Molly Palmer‑Jones investigate, unpicking family tensions, past affairs and the damaging secrets James may have unearthed in his work.

A birdwatching trip aboard the Jessie Ellen off the Cornish coast delivers every twitcher’s dream—a rare sea bird never before recorded. But the thrill turns sour when obsessive birder Greg Franks disappears and later surfaces dead, forcing George Palmer‑Jones to work out who on the boat had reason to kill him.

On the night a youth theatre company is due to perform, its glamorous lead actress Gabriella fails to appear—until she is discovered dead in the boot of director Gus Lynch’s car. As Ramsay and Sergeant Hunter investigate, rising violence on a nearby housing estate suggests the two worlds may be linked.

Molly Palmer‑Jones arrives at her aunt Ursula’s idyllic cottage to find her dead on the sofa. Ursula had recently clashed with her landlord, a politician whose gamekeeping practices killed a rare bird and Ursula’s own cats. George and Molly uncover estate‑wide secrets to learn who benefited from her death.

Vicars’ wife Dorothea Cassidy devotes her Thursdays to visiting parishioners others would rather forget: lonely pensioners, troubled teenagers, gamblers and women in violent relationships. When she is found strangled on a June afternoon, Inspector Ramsay must trace her final day through lives transformed by her kindness—and resentment.

In the village of Heppleburn, no one speaks ill of kind, interfering Alice Parry—until she is murdered in her garden on a bitter St David’s Eve. As Ramsay questions relatives and neighbours, he uncovers family tensions and small kindnesses that may have had deadly consequences.

Heppleburn, a once close‑knit Northumberland pit village, is shaken when unpopular headmaster Harold Medburn is shot dead. While the school caretaker and his daughter chase their own theories, newly introduced Inspector Ramsay battles false leads and community suspicion during a tense All Hallows’ Eve.

At the Grose Hill Hotel, an Open Day to support protection of local peregrine falcons ends in horror when hotelier Eleanor Masefield is found dead beneath a mounted hawk. Old friend George Palmer‑Jones and his wife Molly question whether Eleanor was victim or predator in a web of manipulation.

Newlyweds Jim and Sarah return from honeymoon to the Scottish island of Kinness for a raucous welcome‑home party. The celebration turns dark when Jim’s younger sister falls—or is pushed—from perilous rocks, and George Palmer‑Jones probes the island’s tangled loyalties and old grudges.

Members of a bird observatory trust visit Gillibry, a privately owned island off the North Devon coast, only to learn the owner plans to sell. After a fire and a fierce storm, trustee Charlie Todd is found dead in a bird hide, and George Palmer‑Jones must identify the killer among his fellow birders.

Young birdwatcher Tom French is found dead in a Norfolk marsh, his head smashed and binoculars still around his neck. Amateur sleuth George Palmer‑Jones, an older birder, quietly follows the trail through jealousies, rivalries and romantic entanglements in the twitching community.