Grace O'Malley Books in Order

The Grace O'Malley series begins with Witch Hunt, a London police procedural by Richard O'Rawe and Bernadette O'Rawe. Its lead is Detective Superintendent Grace O'Malley of the Metropolitan Police, an investigator who has to stay focused when a brutal case crashes into an already troubled part of her personal life.

Grace is practical, direct, and not easily pushed around. That matters when a caller using the name Matthew Hopkins, the seventeenth-century Witchfinder General, contacts her with a warning about murder. The name is not a random flourish. It points to a killer using the history of witch hunts to frame present-day crimes.

The case begins with a murder that is designed to be seen. A woman is killed, and the investigation quickly becomes a high-profile search for someone who understands how to turn public fear, historical imagery, and modern media into weapons. Grace has to work out what connects the victims before the killer can choose another target.

London gives the story its scale and its tension. It is a city full of cameras, crowds, landmarks, police resources, and places where a person can still disappear. The question running through the book is simple but unsettling: how can someone plan spectacular crimes in a city that seems to watch everything? Grace and her team must separate performance from evidence while the public pressure builds.

The historical thread adds an eerie edge without taking the story away from its police work. Matthew Hopkins was a real figure from England's witch-hunting past, and the killer's borrowed identity makes that past feel uncomfortably close. The result is a crime novel that combines interviews, leads, forensic questions, and procedural detail with a darker sense of menace.

Grace's home life also complicates the job. Her husband Dominic holds a senior position in the same police world, and a personal shock early in the story leaves her with little room to hide from either the investigation or her own anger. That tension gives Grace something at stake beyond closing a case.

Start with Witch Hunt. It introduces Grace, her professional world, and the mix of modern policing and historical horror that defines the series. Readers can expect a tense London investigation, a determined detective, and crimes that force the past into the present.