David Mitre Books in Order

The David Mitre novels show a different side of Michael Grant, trading teenage protagonists and speculative settings for an older, very unreliable narrator on the run. David is a former burglar and con artist who reinvented himself as a crime writer, then skipped out on serious charges in the United States. When the series opens he is hiding in the Mediterranean, trying to keep a low profile and enjoy the view.

Trouble, naturally, finds him anyway.

A Sudden Death in Cyprus starts with David sitting at a beach bar, watching tourists, when a woman is stabbed to death in front of him with chilling efficiency. He would prefer to walk away, but the local police and a pair of visiting FBI agents quickly notice that a man living under an alias happened to be on the scene. They pressure him into using his old skills to poke around places they cannot easily reach, drawing him into a plot that touches refugee camps, organized crime, and his own complicated past.

In An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam, David travels north to speak at a writers’ conference and catch up with old friends. Instead he dodges assassination attempts and runs into FBI agent Delia Delacorte again. She needs his help to derail a plan to steal a priceless Vermeer painting, a scheme backed by powerful people who expect to get away clean. The combination of book festival gossip, museum intrigue, and professional thieves keeps both David and the reader busy.

What ties the books together is David’s voice, which is sardonic, self aware, and full of digressions that eventually circle back to the point. The stories move quickly between banter, bursts of violence, and moments of unexpected compassion. They live in the same moral territory as classic caper novels: everyone is a little crooked, but some people are a lot worse than others.

While each book has a self contained mystery, reading them in order lets you watch David’s history unfold and his relationship with the authorities evolve from barely controlled hostility toward something like cooperation. This is squarely adult crime fiction, set in real European cities and interested in how politics, money, and personal loyalties tangle together behind the scenes.