Cara Hunter Books in Order

If you want the main story from the beginning: Close to Home → In the Dark → No Way Out
If you want the Oxford police team at full strength: All The Rage → The Whole Truth → Hope to Die
If you want the long-shadow Daisy Mason thread: Close to Home → Making a Killing
If you want a standalone, true-crime-style puzzle: Murder in the Family

Cara Hunter writes crime novels that look at Oxford from street level, not from the postcard angle. She studied English at Oxford in the 1980s, went back for a doctorate in 2003, and made the city the home turf of DI Adam Fawley and his team. She still lives there, on a street she has said is not so very different from the ones in her books.

Books were her escape route early on.

Hunter has written about coming from a state school background and a family where no one had previously taken A levels. There were not many books at home, so the local library mattered a lot. Those weekly visits fed a serious reading habit, and she has said that without them she would never have reached Oxford in the first place.

Before fiction took over, she spent about fifteen years in business, first in the City and later in public relations for Guinness, now part of Diageo. After that she worked as a freelance copywriter. That stretch seems to have taught her a lot about pace, clarity, and deadlines, all of which show up in novels that move quickly but stay precise. She has also spoken proudly about creating a humanitarian and environmental initiative called Water of Life during her Guinness years.

The turn toward crime fiction came in a very ordinary way. On a holiday in the Caribbean in November 2014, she finished a crime novel and grumbled that the ending did not live up to the setup. Her husband told her, reasonably enough, to write her own. By the end of the trip she had the idea, title, and a short synopsis for Close to Home.

That book, published in 2017, introduced readers to Adam Fawley through the disappearance of eight-year-old Daisy Mason from a family party on a quiet Oxford street. It was a strong start, and readers quickly noticed what Hunter does well: clean plotting, sharp twists, and a modern documentary feel built from interviews, messages, news reports, and other scraps of evidence. In the Dark and No Way Out showed that the first success was no fluke.

She likes secrets that hide in plain sight.

Across books like All The Rage, The Whole Truth, and Hope to Die, Hunter keeps returning to the same pressure points: families under strain, public stories that do not match private facts, and institutions that can miss what is right in front of them. Her Oxford is not just dreaming spires. It is basements, side streets, farms, police interview rooms, and respectable houses with bad things happening behind the front door.

She can also stretch the form when she wants to. Murder in the Family turns a cold case into the transcript of a true-crime show, complete with documents, media fragments, and competing theories, and Making a Killing brings that interest in public spectacle back into Adam Fawley's world. The through line is easy to spot: Hunter likes puzzles, but she likes the people inside the puzzle just as much.

The books have reached a very wide audience, with the Fawley series selling in many languages, but the appeal is pretty down to earth. Readers come for the twists, then stay for the team, the setting, and the feeling that no version of the truth is ever the whole thing. Off the page, Hunter has said she loves cats, champagne, chocolate, and watching true crime on TV. It sounds like research because, in her case, it probably is.