Harry Strong PI Mystery Books in Order

The Harry Strong PI Mystery books follow a private investigator who is nobody’s idea of a knight in shining armor. Harry is an ex‑cop with a wrecked reputation, kicked off the force after a split‑second mistake left his partner dead. By the time the series opens he’s drinking too much, broke more often than not, and keeping a tiny agency alive on whatever cases limp through the door.

What Harry does still have are decent instincts, a nose for trouble, and a stubborn streak that won’t let him walk away from people in danger. In Murder Past Midnight, a titled client brings him to a grand estate to look into a severed human foot found on the grounds. The job sounds contained—identify the victim, keep the press away, spare the family any scandal—but it throws Harry into the path of a vicious, sexually sadistic suspect who enjoys breaking people open and finding their weak spots.

Other books in the series push him into different corners of the same dark world. In one, he’s hired as a bodyguard and winds up with a dead client on his hands, racing to find out who turned a protection job into a setup. In another, collected guests at a swanky gathering start dying one by one, and Harry has to pick apart a classic closed‑circle whodunit full of doubles, affairs, and old money secrets. Throughout, there’s a recurring thread of powerful people assuming they can buy their way out of anything—and Harry discovering how dangerous it is to prove them wrong.

Running alongside the individual mysteries is Harry’s messy personal life. He falls into affairs he knows are bad ideas, nurses grudges, and keeps fumbling any chance at steady happiness. The books don’t soften the material: scenes of cruelty, BDSM, and exploitation are played straight, without winking, and Harry often comes away more scarred than triumphant.

What links the series together is the tension between Harry’s worst impulses and his lingering sense of duty. He’s capable of making truly bad choices, but he also can’t quite stop trying to do the right thing once people depend on him. Readers who like their crime fiction hardboiled, violent, and unpolished will find in the Harry Strong novels a PI who feels less like a puzzle‑solving genius and more like a deeply flawed man trying to keep his head above water in cases that only get uglier the closer he looks.