Gardener and Reilly Books in Order

DI Stewart Gardener returns to duty after his wife's murder and walks into a baffling Leeds case. Two Father Christmas performers are dead, their flesh ruined by an unknown method, and nothing about the killings makes sense.

When an actor's corpse is found hanging on stage, Gardener and his team lock down the theatre and chase a killer who seems able to vanish at will. The case grows more personal as taunting clues point toward Gardener's family.

In a quiet Yorkshire market town, Gardener and Sean Reilly find a corpse nailed to a cellar wall, lips sewn shut and a strange scar hinting at something worse. More bodies follow, and the search for motive turns into a hunt for a sadistic killer.

What looks like a burglary gone wrong starts to reveal a far messier pattern. Gardener hunts a killer hiding behind false faces while someone else is also chasing revenge.

A missing five-year-old girl seems to have vanished without a trace, until her photograph is found beneath a murdered woman. As more deaths surface, Gardener and Reilly race to connect the cases before time runs out.

A struggling publisher is found hanging in Kirkstall Abbey, and the scene quickly stops looking like suicide. As a key witness begins to unravel, Gardener faces a slippery case where a hypnotist may hold the missing piece.

A deadly hit and run in a Yorkshire village is anything but random. Gardener and Reilly follow a trail of fake identities and cybercrime, only to find a vigilante may be reaching suspects before the police can.

Gardener and Reilly face one of their grisliest cases when a body stitched together from four victims is found in a disused property. A chess piece and a cryptic message suggest the killer is only getting started.

A burnt-out van in a Yorkshire field contains a body that Gardener can barely identify. As robbery cases and a missing person investigation start to overlap, the team struggles to work out who is tied to which crime.

When a young woman collapses in a quiet village, police uncover a shocking murder involving removed kidneys and a killer with a plan to dodge accountability. Gardener's team has to solve the crime before justice slips away again.

Gardener's first tentative romantic evening since his wife's death ends with a brutal new case. A man is found tied to a chair, mutilated, and possibly killed as part of a message only the detectives are meant to understand.

Young actress Sonia Markham is found dead in her flat, posed in an armchair with a bowl of soup and no obvious sign of foul play. Gardener refuses to let the case die, even as everyone around him calls it natural causes.

A woman's skull turns up mounted on a spear outside Leeds, etched with a Latin word square and stripped nearly beyond recognition. When more skulls appear, Gardener realizes the killer is digging through old cases, and may be coming for him.