Fennimore and Simms Books in Order

The Fennimore and Simms books are built around an uneasy partnership between DCI Kate Simms and Professor Nick Fennimore. Kate is a senior detective with Manchester ties and a career that has already taken damage. Nick is a forensic expert, lecturer, and sometime consultant whose brilliance comes wrapped in bad timing and difficult judgement. Before Everyone Lies even begins, the two share a wound: Kate broke rules to help Nick after his wife was murdered and his daughter disappeared, and the fallout never really stopped.

That old damage is part of the series engine.

In Everyone Lies, what starts as suspicious deaths among drug users opens into a wider case shaped by police politics, media attention, and the sense that people in authority are hiding as much as they reveal. The pleasure of these books is not just in finding the killer. It is in watching Kate and Nick work from different angles, police procedure on one side, forensic reasoning on the other, while both are forced to reckon with what they still owe each other.

The forensic side matters here. These novels spend real time on scene work, toxicology, statistics, lab evidence, timing, and the slow business of proving a theory. But they are not dry. The detail works because it sits inside high pressure cases, and because Nick's expertise is never neutral. He is personally entangled, sometimes impulsive, and often driven by questions that the police would rather keep at arm's length.

Believe No One widens the scope to St Louis and Oklahoma, following Kate into a method exchange posting and pulling Nick toward a case involving murdered mothers and missing children. The geography changes, but the tension stays the same. These are books about old cases that leak into new ones, about systems that miss the vulnerable, and about how quickly a professional investigation can turn personal. The longer arc around Nick's missing daughter and the murder of his wife keeps tugging at the edges until it moves closer to the center.

These books have mud on their boots and paperwork on their desks.

By the time Truth Will Out arrives, AD Garrett is leaning fully into the things that make the series work: abduction cases, bureaucratic obstruction, morally complicated choices, and the unresolved history between the two leads. Manchester matters here as more than a backdrop, and even the American sections keep that grounded, lived-in feel. There are recurring questions about family, guilt, trust, and the price of being right too late. If you like crime series where the central duo never quite relaxes around each other, and where the science deepens the suspense instead of showing off, Fennimore and Simms is a very good fit.