Grayle Underhill & Bobby Maiden Books in Order

The Grayle Underhill and Bobby Maiden novels sit slightly to one side of Phil Rickman’s better-known series, but they share his favourite ground: the Welsh border, where media, mysticism and crime collide. They were first published under the pseudonym Will Kingdom and have a slightly harder, more noirish edge than the Merrily Watkins books.

Bobby Maiden is a detective inspector whose honesty makes him a problem in a deeply corrupt police division. At the beginning of The Cold Calling he is left for dead in a hit-and-run engineered by his own colleagues. Clinically dead for a short time, he is pulled back by Sister Anderson, a nurse and alternative healer. The experience leaves him with disturbing, bone-deep memories of a cold afterlife and a sense that something is still unfinished.

While Bobby is hiding out in the crumbling castle home of reclusive writer Marcus Bacton, other threads are tightening. In the nearby hills, an elderly housekeeper remembers a childhood vision at a prehistoric mound. Cindy Mars-Lewis, a cross-dressing entertainer who believes he has shamanic gifts, is convinced that a serial killer is operating around Britain’s ancient stones and burial sites. Into this mix comes Grayle Underhill, an American journalist nicknamed “Holy Grayle” for her New Age column, searching for a sister who vanished in the same landscape.

Mean Spirit picks up many of these characters and throws them into another storm. Seffi Callard, once the world’s most fashionable medium, has become a paranoid recluse in the Cotswolds, terrified by a stalker who may or may not be dead. Marcus, now ill, sends Grayle to investigate in his place. Bobby, still dealing with the fallout from his near-death, finds himself drawn into a case that mixes celebrity culture, organised crime and the murky ethics of those who trade in comfort from beyond the veil.

Although marketed under a different name, these books are clearly part of Rickman’s wider tapestry. They share locations and minor characters with the Merrily Watkins world, and the later standalone Night After Night brings Grayle and others back in a modern twist on the haunted-house story, this time filtered through reality television.

What distinguishes the Grayle and Bobby strand is its willingness to look directly at the overlap between spiritual seeking and exploitation: television psychics, glossy magazines, haunted tourist sites and the people who get hurt when belief is turned into business. The novels can be dark and sometimes brutal, but like Rickman’s other work they keep one eye on ordinary decency, asking how fallible people try to act well when the ground under their feet is full of old bones and older stories.