Ged Gillmore Books in Order

If you want the main crime series: Headland → Class Act → Base Nature
If you want a standalone thriller: The Lightning Rod
If you want funny books for younger readers: Cats on the Run → Cats Undercover
If you want travel writing: Stans By Me

Ged Gillmore grew up in the Midlands of England and later moved to London, where he completed degrees in languages and literature at the University of London. Before settling into life as a novelist, he worked in France, Germany and Italy, then spent another eighteen years back in London. In early 2004 he traded all that for Sydney, a move that helps explain why so much of his fiction is alert to outsiders, reinvention, and the awkward work of starting over.

Writing seems to have arrived early. Gillmore has said he was the kid reading homemade thrillers to his parents and wondering why they were not more impressed. Later, he studied at the Australian Writers' Centre and the Writers' Studio in Sydney. A teacher's simple idea, that a writer is someone who keeps writing, clearly stayed with him, because his career has been built book by book across crime, children's fiction, and travel writing.

He doesn't write from a lofty tower.

Gillmore has described himself as someone who balances fiction with a day job, and when he is not at the keyboard he has been known to fall off a surfboard at Bondi. He has also said he tries to write three hours a day, whatever else is going on. That steady, practical approach fits the books. So does his taste for real-world detail. He has talked about drawing ideas from conversations with criminals, judges, and police officers, which helps give his mysteries their grounded, lived-in feel.

His best-known crime books are the Bill Murdoch novels, Headland, Class Act, and Base Nature. The series arrived fast, beginning with Headland in October 2017 and continuing with Class Act in January 2018 and Base Nature in March 2018. Murdoch is not a polished detective. He is a damaged ex-criminal, an Englishman in Australia, and a man forever trying to outrun his past. Readers who click with these books usually enjoy the mix of danger, dry humour, and strong Australian settings, especially the contrast between Sydney and the New South Wales coast. Class Act was longlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel in 2018.

Then he swerved.

With Cats on the Run and Cats Undercover, Gillmore turned to younger readers and showed a very different side of his writing. These books follow Tuck and Ginger, a pair of quarrelsome cats dropped into wild, fast-moving adventures full of witches, catbots, and comic chaos. The tone is lighter and much sillier, but the engine is similar. Strong characters get into trouble, make things worse, and somehow keep going.

He has also written outside fiction. Stans By Me follows a trip through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and lets him lean into observation and deadpan humour. In The Lightning Rod, a standalone crime thriller set in Sydney and the Philippines, he moves back toward darker ground with a story that begins with an Uber ride and a corpse. Across all of it, he seems drawn to pressure, moral blur, and the small choices that turn an ordinary day into a very bad one.

These days Gillmore divides his time between Australia, Ireland, and the UK. That feels fitting for a writer whose work so often circles movement, dislocation, and the hope of finding firmer ground. Whether he is writing noir, children's comedy, or travel memoir, he tends to focus on people who are out of place, under strain, and a little more complicated than they first appear.