Fawkes and Baxter Books in Order

The Fawkes and Baxter books are dark, high-speed crime thrillers built around a detective team that is almost as volatile as the cases they catch. The series opens with Ragdoll, where London detective William 'Wolf' Fawkes is pulled into a grotesque murder investigation after a corpse stitched together from six victims is discovered. At his side, or sometimes cleaning up after him, is Detective Emily Baxter, his former partner and one of the few people who knows just how brilliant and infuriating he can be.

The body count is high, but the character tension is what gives the books their shape.

Wolf is not a calm, methodical sleuth. He is impulsive, bruised by earlier cases, and always one bad call away from making his own life worse. Baxter is steadier, sharper about office politics, and often the person holding the line when the case starts turning into chaos. Alex Edmunds adds another angle, eager, smart, and caught between admiration and alarm. London matters here too, not just as a backdrop, but as a city of tabloids, pressure, and police bureaucracy.

Each novel brings a new investigation, but the fallout carries over. Hangman shifts Baxter closer to the center and sends the story into a tense transatlantic hunt after a murder on Brooklyn Bridge is echoed in London. The case forces her to work with American agents while dealing with copycat crimes, mistrust, and a killer who seems to stay ahead of every move.

By Endgame, the series turns inward as much as outward. What starts with a locked-room death pulls Wolf, Baxter, and Edmunds into old secrets and police corruption. The books are linked less by one single villain than by the damage left behind, inside the team, inside the job, and inside the people who keep choosing to do it anyway.

Tone matters a lot in this series. Cole writes grisly setups, but he also likes sharp dialogue, black humor, and fast scene changes. These are not cozy mysteries, and they are not especially interested in neat heroes. They are tense, messy police thrillers about obsession, loyalty, public pressure, and how hard it is to trust anyone when the case starts touching your own life.

Ragdoll was adapted for television in 2021, but the books are still the best way to follow the team's full arc, especially the changing balance between Wolf and Baxter from one novel to the next.