Ellie McEwan Books in Order

The Ellie McEwan books take Joy Ellis away from the Lincolnshire Fens to a leafy Surrey village, but they keep her focus on ordinary people pulled into very dark events. This time the twist is a touch of the supernatural.

Ellie McEwan runs a flower shop and leads a fairly quiet life until a winter night when a figure steps into the road and she crashes trying to avoid him. When she wakes in hospital in An Aura of Mystery, nothing looks quite the same. Every person she sees is outlined in colour, and the shifting auras seem to reflect mood, health and something harder to name.

At first Ellie assumes she’s simply concussed or imagining things, but the effect doesn’t fade. As she experiments, awkwardly, with what the colours might mean, a killer is hunting professional women in the area. Three are dead, their hands crushed, and the police have few real leads. A local DCI, Bob Foreman, is sceptical of anything that sounds mystical, yet he’s desperate enough to listen when Ellie’s strange new sense starts pointing toward danger.

The series blends village mystery, police procedural and a believable take on the paranormal. Ellie’s gift doesn’t hand her neat answers; it nudges, confuses and sometimes frightens her. She still has to weigh what she sees against ordinary clues, interviews and her own judgement. That tension carries into The Colour of Mystery, where her involvement with the police deepens and the risks of being “useful” to an investigation become painfully clear.

Around Ellie, Ellis builds a small community of friends, customers and neighbours who react in very human ways to her changing role: some are fascinated, some wary, some openly dismissive. The books never lose sight of the fact that Ellie is not a cop. She is an ordinary woman whose life was quietly ticking along until one crash rewired it, and now she has to decide how much she is willing to risk to stop someone else’s nightmare.

If you like crime fiction with a slightly uncanny edge — grounded characters, real‑world stakes and just enough of the unexplained — the Ellie McEwan series offers something a little different while still feeling like classic Joy Ellis.