Detective Eden Berrisford Books in Order

The Detective Eden Berrisford books sit at the crossroads of Mel Sherratt's worlds. Set in the small city of Stockleigh, clearly inspired by Stoke-on-Trent, they link directly to the Mitchell Estate while introducing a new detective with her own baggage and loyalties.

Eden leads the Community Intelligence Team, a unit that gathers information from tenants, shopkeepers and youth workers as much as from official databases. That role lets the books move between incident rooms, estates and family kitchens, showing how crime ripples through ordinary lives.

In The Girls Next Door, five teenagers meet in a local park and only four of them make it home. Months after Deanna Barker's fatal stabbing, a series of vicious attacks on teens rocks Stockleigh. Are they reprisals for Deanna, or something else? Eden is already under pressure when her niece Jess goes missing, turning the investigation into a race to save someone she loves while the whole estate watches.

Don't Look Behind You raises the stakes in a different way. Three women in the town are attacked within days, and the pattern suggests a predator who is targeting those who should feel safest at home. The case draws Eden into the orbit of Carla, a woman trying to rebuild her life after leaving an abusive marriage. Carla's ex-husband is out of prison and still a dangerous presence in the background, and as their paths cross, Eden must balance protecting a survivor with catching a violent offender.

What makes the Eden Berrisford novels stand out is the way they weave together family roles and professional duty. Eden is a mother as well as a detective, caring for her teenage daughter Laura and worrying about the next generation growing up around gang culture and peer pressure. Characters from The Estate series, such as housing officer Josie Mellor, make brief appearances, grounding the books in a shared universe of streets and estates.

Readers can expect gritty subject matter ' knife crime, domestic abuse, intimidation ' but also a strong thread of solidarity between women who refuse to look away when other families are in trouble. If you have already spent time on the Mitchell Estate, The Girls Next Door is a natural next stop.