Cruel Secrets Books in Order

The Cruel Secrets books dig into the Raven family, a clan where faith, blood and violence are tangled together. Across the trilogy and its prequel you follow Kelly Raven and those orbiting her as they try to escape the legacy of Eddie Raven’s criminal reign.

In Cruel Secrets, fifteen‑year‑old Kelly has spent her life under the thumb of a strict, religious mother. One act, described only as the ultimate sin, pushes her to run, and she discovers that the cold streets of London are kinder than the home she left. She falls in with a drug dealer, two fraudsters and a prostitute, and for the first time starts to feel like herself. What she doesn’t realise is that Eddie Raven, the father she barely knows, is coming for her – and he isn’t interested in forgiveness.

Wicked Lies widens the lens to the River children, especially seventeen‑year‑old Malakai. Left to feed and protect his younger sisters in a damp cottage, he watches his mother chase freedom with a small‑time gangster and walk away from her kids. When she finally returns, she finds a decomposing body in the house and Kelly Raven in the middle of it all. Malakai is dragged into a criminal world he barely understands, haunted by the sense that he carries his father’s face and reputation whether he wants them or not.

In Ugly Truth, Kelly appears to have made it. Her business is thriving, her family is settled and she is expecting a baby. That fragile peace shatters in a single night when old firms move against the Ravens to settle scores left over from Eddie’s reckless rule. A vengeful detective is on the run, another Raven steps forward to challenge Kelly’s position, and a masked gunman forces her to fight alone for everything she has built.

The prequel, Raising A Gangster, rewinds to Bermondsey and the childhood of Cyril Reardon. Raised by a poor, determined mother, Cyril learns early how to charm, scheme and take risks. A brush with an upper‑class family shows him another world, and a shooting that was meant to kill him sends him down a path toward the underworld instead. It fills in the roots of the power structures and grudges that shape Kelly’s later life.

Taken together, these books are raw, street‑level stories about how people are made by the families they are born into and the ones they choose. Expect strong language, sharp turns and characters who do terrible things for reasons that often make uncomfortable sense.