DCI Clements Books in Order

The DCI Clements novels are domestic crime stories set in contemporary London, built around one determined detective and the women who vanish on her watch. Starting with Woman Last Seen and continuing into Two Dead Wives, the books blend police investigation with the emotional fallout inside families left behind.

In Woman Last Seen, Clements is called when Leigh Fletcher, a stepmother who travels for work, fails to come home from a routine business trip. At almost the same time Kai Janssen, the glamorous wife of a wealthy Dutch businessman, disappears after leaving their penthouse for a visit to her sick mother. On paper the two women come from different worlds, but Clements can’t shake the feeling that their cases are connected.

The tension comes less from forensics than from watching secrets inside these marriages peel back, layer by layer.

Two Dead Wives picks up the threads in a fresh way. A woman who has lived under two identities is now missing, presumed dead, and both of her husbands are suspects in what has become a tabloid-sensational case. While Clements tries to work out whether she’s hunting a killer or searching for someone who might still be alive, a woman named Stacie Jones recuperates in a remote village, cut off from news and struggling with severe memory loss under the watchful eye of the man who calls himself her father.

As the story weaves between the high-profile investigation and Stacie’s foggy, sheltered life, it gradually reveals how trauma, reinvention and coercion can erase a person on paper long before their body is found. The Covid-era setting, with interviews conducted over video calls and travel restricted, adds an extra layer of isolation to an already claustrophobic mystery.

Clements herself is drawn as a grounded, empathetic cop who knows the statistics on missing people are grim and refuses to be numbed by them. She trusts her instincts, pushes back against bureaucratic blind spots and male colleagues, and often acts as the moral barometer in stories where everyone else has something to hide.

Read together, the DCI Clements books examine bigamy, domestic violence, obsession and the way seemingly ordinary homes can conceal enormous risk. They’re well suited to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a strong investigative thread, and they work best read in order from Woman Last Seen to Two Dead Wives so the emotional history between characters can build.