Imogen Robertson Books in Order

For the full Crowther and Westerman journey: Instruments of Darkness → Anatomy of Murder → Island of Bones → Circle of Shadows → Theft of Life
If you want to try the series first: Instruments of Darkness → Anatomy of Murder
If you prefer a standalone historical thriller: The Paris Winter
For sweeping Wilbur Smith style adventure: King of Kings → Fire on the Horizon

Imogen Robertson was born and brought up in Darlington, in northeast England, and she is now based in London. She studied Russian and German at Cambridge University, which already hints at the kind of writer she would become, someone interested in language, history, borders, and the way people carry the past with them.

Before fiction became her full-time work, she directed for TV, film, and radio. That kind of storytelling life came before the novels, and it gave her a practical route into building scenes, handling tension, and moving characters through pressure without losing the human detail.

Her public break as a novelist came in 2007, when she won the Telegraph’s First Thousand Words of a Novel competition. The winning opening became Instruments of Darkness, her debut novel, and from there grew into the Crowther and Westerman series.

A pretty good way to start.

Those books are set in the late eighteenth century and pair two memorable investigators, Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther. Harriet is sharp, restless, and unwilling to stay inside the limits her society sets for her. Crowther is a reclusive anatomist with a formidable mind and a troubled family history. Across Instruments of Darkness, Anatomy of Murder, Island of Bones, Circle of Shadows, and Theft of Life, Robertson sends them through murders, secrets, political pressure, and the moral mess of Georgian Britain.

Readers tend to come to these novels for the mysteries, then stay for the partnership. The books move from Sussex to London, from the Lake District to Germany, and they keep widening their frame without losing the intimacy of two people trying to understand a violent world. Her work in this period also brought award recognition, including shortlist attention for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2011 and the CWA Dagger in the Library in 2012.

She has also written beyond that series. The Paris Winter shifts to Belle Époque Paris and follows a young English art student, Maud Heighton, through ambition, poverty, glamour, and danger. Robertson has said the novel was partly inspired by her paternal grandmother, a free-spirited traveller who crossed Europe with money sewn into her skirts, and by reading about the Paris floods of 1909 and 1910. It is a good example of what she does so well, taking a beautiful historical setting and letting the unease underneath it rise slowly to the surface.

She likes a glossy surface with trouble underneath.

Later, Robertson also stepped into Wilbur Smith’s adventure world, co-writing King of Kings and Fire on the Horizon. Those novels are much larger in scale, with war, imperial politics, and the Courtney and Ballantyne families crossing paths, but they still show her interest in people under strain and history in motion.

What links all of this work is her feel for the past as something lived, not displayed. Her books are full of danger, certainly, but also of systems, habits, loyalties, and blind spots. Whether she is writing a Georgian murder investigation, a Paris thriller, or a continent-spanning adventure, she tends to focus on the moment when private lives get squeezed by larger forces. That is what gives her fiction its energy. It never feels like a costume exercise. It feels inhabited.