Dan Starkey Books in Order
Part ofColin Bateman Books in OrderThis page lists the Dan Starkey novels by Colin Bateman in order, with book summaries, series background, and suggestions on the best place to start this Belfast comic crime run.
Last updated: January 16, 2026
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Publication Order
10 books
The Dead Pass
by Colin Bateman
2014
Dan Starkey travels to Derry when veteran activist Moira Doherty hires him to track down her missing son Billy, a violent criminal with a drug problem. When Moira's body is later pulled from the river beneath the Peace Bridge, Starkey is dragged into the city's porn and drug underworld and a very personal vendetta.
Nine Inches
by Colin Bateman
2013
Shock jock Jack Caramac's four year old son is kidnapped for exactly one hour and returned unharmed, a warning rather than a ransom job. Dan Starkey, now calling himself an upmarket private eye, is hired to find out who is behind it and soon runs into drug dealing paramilitaries and burning houses.
Fire and Brimstone
by Colin Bateman
2013
A media billionaire's daughter vanishes after a massacre at a Belfast student party, and Dan Starkey is hired to find her. At the same time he is asked to prove that a fiery religious movement is behind an arson attack on a new abortion clinic, only to suspect the two cases may be linked.
Belfast Confidential
by Colin Bateman
2005
After his friend Mouse, editor of glossy gossip magazine Belfast Confidential, is murdered, Dan Starkey reluctantly takes over the job. Mouse was compiling a list of the city's fifty most powerful people and Starkey becomes convinced that the names at the top will kill to stay off the front page.
Driving Big Davie
by Colin Bateman
2004
Dan Starkey heads to Florida with his giant friend Big Davie, who has a spare honeymoon ticket and a broken heart. What starts as a sun soaked road trip turns into a violent quest for revenge that forces Starkey to confront grief, loyalty and how far he will go for a friend.
The Horse with My Name
by Colin Bateman
2002
Unemployed and separated from his wife, Dan Starkey is asked by failed bookmaker Mark Corkery to investigate racing tycoon Geordie McClean. The deeper he digs into the horse business, the more he uncovers crooked deals, old scores and threats that hit far too close to home.
Shooting Sean
by Colin Bateman
2001
Dan Starkey is hired by fading movie star Sean O'Toole, who wants to reinvent himself by directing a film about an infamous IRA killer. What should be a cushy job turns deadly as political enemies, old paramilitaries and the film's subject close in on both men.
The Turbulent Priests
by Colin Bateman
1999
Dan Starkey is sent by church authorities to a tiny island off the Irish coast to investigate claims that a young girl is the new Messiah. In a dry community full of secrets and simmering resentments, he finds miracles, media frenzy and very human motives.
Of Wee Sweetie Mice & Men
by Colin Bateman
1996
Dan Starkey is hired to ghostwrite the life story of Bobby "Fat Boy" McMaster, Ireland's heavyweight boxing champion, ahead of a big fight in New York. When McMaster's wife is kidnapped, Starkey must navigate gangsters, promoters and old grudges to keep everyone alive.
Divorcing Jack
by Colin Bateman
1995
Set in Belfast during a tense election, Divorcing Jack follows drunken columnist Dan Starkey after a careless kiss leads to murder, blackmail and a political conspiracy. His attempts to save his marriage and his own skin fuel a fast, very funny crime caper.
Series background & context
The Dan Starkey books follow a cynical Belfast journalist who keeps being dragged into trouble that is far above his pay grade. Dan starts out as a newspaper columnist who drinks too much, loves his wife Patricia in a slightly haphazard way and has a knack for saying the wrong thing to dangerous people. When bodies start to fall around him, he tends to react with a bad joke and then stumble toward the truth.
In the debut, Divorcing Jack, Starkey is meant to be covering Northern Irish politics during an election when a drunken kiss with a student tips him into a chain of murders and a high level conspiracy. The mix of sectarian tension, grubby deals and slapstick chases sets the tone for the rest of the series, where Belfast itself feels like a character that never quite lets him go.
Later cases send him further afield. In Of Wee Sweetie Mice & Men he is supposed to be ghostwriting a book for Irish heavyweight champion Bobby McMaster ahead of a fight with Mike Tyson, only to be dragged into a kidnapping and gangland feud in New York. Turbulent Priests takes him to a remote island off the Irish coast to investigate claims that a young girl might be the new Messiah, where he runs into tight lipped locals, church politics and the kind of dry community where trouble simmers under the surface.
Back home, Starkey is hired by fading action hero Sean O'Toole in Shooting Sean, asked to investigate racing magnate Geordie McClean in The Horse with My Name and lured into a Florida road trip with his old friend Big Davie in Driving Big Davie. Each book riffs on a different world film sets, crooked stables, Florida theme parks while keeping the same scruffy mix of wisecracks, hangovers and sudden, often shocking violence.
The later novels, including Belfast Confidential, Nine Inches, Fire and Brimstone and The Dead Pass, find Starkey reinventing himself as an upmarket private eye. He edits a glossy magazine after the murder of a friend, digs into a one hour child kidnapping that points at drug running paramilitaries, juggles a missing heiress with an arson attack on an abortion clinic and hunts for a missing addict in Derry as new gangster factions rise.
Across the series readers get a loose arc of Dan's personal life his chaotic marriage to Patricia, the ups and downs of fatherhood, friendships won and lost but every novel still works as a crime story in its own right. The tone swings from slapstick to bleak in a line or two, yet the books stay grounded in small human choices as much as in politics or terrorism.
If you like crime fiction that mixes gallows humour with real emotional bruises, and a narrator who insists on having the last word even when the gun is pointing at him, Dan Starkey is an easy series to sink into.
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