DI Bob Willis Books in Order

The DI Bob Willis books shift Damien Boyd's crime fiction back to the mid-1980s and give it a very different center of gravity. Mungo 'Bob' Willis is not a rising star. He is an older detective being forced out of Avon and Somerset Police on medical grounds after a sting goes wrong, leaving him injured and grieving the death of his partner, DS Lizzie Harper. From the start, the series is about a policeman who thinks his career has ended badly and cannot quite let the last case go.

That makes the whole series feel more bruised, and more personal.

The 1980s setting matters. Bob works in a world without mobile phones, CCTV, modern DNA work, or internet trawling, so investigations depend on interviews, memory, paperwork, instinct, and old-fashioned legwork. The west country backdrop is still there, from the A303 to small Somerset towns and the coast, but the atmosphere is older, rougher, and a little lonelier than in the Nick Dixon books.

In Deceived By The Light, Bob is convinced the police have closed the wrong case and left a killer free to target women stranded by the roadside late at night. In Blast from the Past, he is attached to a cold case unit and reopens the 1962 abduction and murder of a nine-year-old boy, only for the past to push violently into the present. Both books are built around unfinished business, the danger of convenient answers, and Bob's refusal to stop digging when everyone else wants to move on.

Bob is not neat, glamorous, or easy company.

That is part of the appeal. He is divorced, physically battered, emotionally frayed, and fully aware that he has not had a shining career, yet he keeps going. Boyd gives him a dry, weary voice and just enough black humor to stop the books becoming miserable. You get the sense of a man who has seen too much, made mistakes, and still cannot walk away from a question that bothers him.

So the tone is a little different from Nick Dixon. These novels are still fast-moving police procedurals, but they have more rust on them, in a good way. They lean into regret, memory, old cases, and the limits of an institution that would often rather close ranks than reopen a wound. If you like crime fiction where the detective is experienced, stubborn, and slightly out of time, and where the 1980s setting genuinely shapes the investigation, this series is likely to hit the spot.