DS Hedley Sharpe Mysteries Books in Order

The DS Hedley Sharpe Mysteries introduce Superintendent Hedley Sharpe, a senior detective in Manchester’s major crime division. He is a long‑serving officer with an impressive clear‑up rate, a rough sense of humour and a private life that is quietly falling apart.

Hedley is a widower. His wife, Emily, was murdered years before the series begins, and her killer was never caught. That unsolved case sits just behind everything he does. He lives alone, eats too many takeaways and throws himself into work, partly because it is what he knows and partly because it is easier than stopping to think.

The first book, Dig Two Graves, opens with an apparently simple domestic scene. Young mother Chloe Todd believes her baby daughter is sleeping in her pram in the back garden. When she lifts the blanket, what she finds sends her neighbour running for the police. At the same time, Hedley is called to a grim discovery in the city centre: a body in the cellar of an empty shop, shot once in the head and left to rot.

A day later, a second body is found in the cellar next door, killed in exactly the same way but far more recently. Hedley does not believe in coincidence. As he and his team start to pull at the threads, they uncover links between the cellar killings, Chloe’s troubled marriage and the unexplained disappearance of a local crime figure.

The investigation drags old secrets into the light and forces Hedley to confront parts of his own past he has tried to ignore. The book spends as much time on the man behind the rank – his guilt, his stubbornness, his flashes of kindness – as it does on witness interviews and scene searches.

In tone, the series sits close to Durrant’s other police procedurals, with clear step‑by‑step work and a strong sense of Manchester’s streets, from busy shopping parades to shuttered units hiding darker business. What sets Hedley’s stories apart is the way his unresolved grief bleeds into his choices, and the sense that every new case might brush against the one that matters most to him. It is a thoughtful, character‑driven strand of her wider crime universe.