Frankie Sheehan Books in Order

The Frankie Sheehan books are dark, modern police procedurals built around a detective who is smart, bruised, and very human. At the start of Too Close to Breathe, Frankie is back at work after a brutal knife attack that left her physically hurt and emotionally off balance. She is already carrying strain before the new case even begins, which gives the whole series an unsettled edge.

That history matters.

Frankie works serious crime in Dublin, and she is the kind of investigator who notices the detail that does not sit right. A hanging body looks too neat. An old family killing refuses to stay in the past. A missing woman leaves blood but no corpse. A boxed murder game starts echoing a live investigation. Across the series, Olivia Kiernan keeps the mysteries rooted in evidence, interviews, pressure from above, and the slow work of peeling away lies.

The setting does a lot of work too. Dublin is more than a backdrop, and so are the coastal edges, suburbs, and later the Wicklow mountains. These are books about modern Ireland, about money, class, reputation, family loyalty, the media, and the gap between how people look from the outside and what is happening inside their homes. Even when the plots get intricate, the social world stays recognizable.

Each novel has its own strong hook. Too Close to Breathe begins with the death of microbiologist Eleanor Costello and a case that spreads into hidden online worlds and secret lives. The Killer in Me pulls Frankie into a new murder investigation just as an old conviction starts being questioned in public. If Looks Could Kill sends her to the Wicklow mountains to investigate Debbie Nugent's disappearance, where one family's story keeps shifting under pressure. The Murder Box gives Frankie a murder mystery game that turns out to be tied to a real missing woman.

These are police procedurals, but they are never just puzzles.

The tone is tense and psychologically sharp, sometimes grim, but not cold. Kiernan is interested in victims as much as killers, and in the damage violence leaves behind. Frankie herself is a big reason people keep reading. She can be wary, stubborn, and sharp-edged, yet there is always a sense that the job costs her something. The cases do stand alone, but the books land best in order because Frankie's confidence, relationships, and scars carry forward from one novel to the next. That ongoing thread gives the later books more weight and makes the series feel like one long recovery story as well as four separate investigations.