Inspector Banks Books in Order

Newly arrived from London to the Yorkshire town of Eastvale, DCI Alan Banks faces a peeping Tom, teenage burglars, and the suspicious death of an elderly woman, while tension at home rises as his work and personal loyalties collide.

Near the village of Helmthorpe, the body of local historian Harry Steadman is found buried beneath a dry-stone wall. Banks probes jealousies and long-held resentments in the dale, while teenager Sally Lumb knows more than is safe to admit.

During an anti-nuclear protest in Eastvale, a bullying uniformed officer is stabbed to death. Banks must sift through radical activists, local misfits, and fellow cops while clashing with ruthless London superintendent “Dirty Dick” Burgess, who wants a quick, convenient result.

In a secluded Yorkshire valley near the village of Swainshead, a hiker discovers a man’s body hanging from a tree. Banks follows the trail through feuding local families, past scandals, and an old double murder that still poisons the present.

Just before Christmas, Caroline Hartley is found naked and stabbed in her cozy living room, the crime scene lit by a tree and log fire. As Banks and DC Susan Gay investigate, they uncover tangled relationships, hidden desires, and motives rooted in old wounds.

A well-dressed couple posing as social workers persuade Brenda Scupham to let them take her seven-year-old daughter Gemma for “tests” and never return. Banks’s search for the missing child soon overlaps with a brutal murder at an abandoned mine, pointing to a predator who targets the vulnerable.

When unremarkable accountant Keith Rothwell is executed with a shotgun outside his remote farmhouse, Banks discovers the victim was not the dull family man he seemed. Tracking money trails and shadowy associates, he uncovers a hidden life built on greed and dangerous partnerships.

In a foggy churchyard, the teenage daughter of a wealthy businessman is found strangled. Public fury settles on a disliked schoolteacher, but as Banks looks deeper into the girl’s world of privilege and lies, he begins to doubt that the obvious suspect is guilty.

A teenage member of a white-power group is kicked to death in an Eastvale alley after a night out. Banks follows leads from racist gangs to the victim’s business partners and local youths he once taunted, uncovering hatreds that run through the whole community.

A drought exposes the drowned village of Hobb’s End beneath a Yorkshire reservoir, where a boy uncovers a woman’s skeleton. Sent to handle this “dead-end” case, Banks teams with DS Annie Cabbot to unravel a wartime murder that still shapes lives fifty years later.

When Chief Constable Riddle’s runaway teenage daughter appears in explicit photos online, he reluctantly begs Banks for help. Tracking her through London’s clubs and music scene, Banks stumbles into organized crime and violence that will follow the girl and her family back to Yorkshire.

Responding to a domestic disturbance in Leeds, officers stumble into a cellar filled with bodies. Banks thinks he has reached the end of a serial killer’s spree, but as he unpicks the survivors’ stories he finds complicity, long-term abuse, and victims far beyond the dead.

Decades after Banks’s fourteen-year-old friend Graham vanished on his paper round, a skeleton near their old hometown is identified as the missing boy. As Banks confronts his own guilt, Annie Cabbot searches for another missing teenager, and the two cases begin to echo one another.

Two narrowboats burn on a frozen Yorkshire canal, leaving two charred bodies and clear signs of arson. Banks and Annie Cabbot follow trails from a teenage runaway and a reclusive artist into a world of art forgery, addiction, and people willing to kill for money and escape.

Shaken by the shooting of a colleague, Banks is drawn south when his estranged brother Roy leaves a terrified voicemail and then vanishes. At the same time, London police find a murdered young woman carrying Roy’s address, pulling Banks into a web of sex, money, and exploitation.

Two murders, nearly four decades apart, collide. In 1969, a young woman is stabbed at a chaotic Yorkshire rock festival; in the present, a music journalist researching that concert is bludgeoned to death. Banks must untangle the long-hidden link before more lives are destroyed.

While Annie Cabbot investigates the death of a wheelchair-bound woman pushed from a cliff in a bleak seaside town, Banks handles the rape and murder of a teenager in Eastvale. Old cases, including a notorious killer, connect the two crimes in unsettling and unexpected ways.

Set designer Mark Hardcastle is found hanged in the woods, and his partner, Laurence Silbert, lies beaten to death in their luxury home. What looks like a murder-suicide draws Banks into the murky world of intelligence work, terrorism fears, and a cover-up that reaches far beyond Eastvale.

A worried mother finds a handgun hidden in her daughter’s room and asks for Banks, who is on holiday abroad. When police try to seize the weapon, tragedy follows, and Banks’s daughter Tracy runs off with the gun’s charming owner, forcing a frantic and very personal pursuit.

DI Bill Quinn is murdered with a crossbow at a police treatment center, and compromising photos of a young woman are found in his room. Paired with Professional Standards inspector Joanna Passero, Banks follows a trail from Yorkshire to Tallinn to uncover what really destroyed Quinn.

Disgraced college lecturer Gavin Miller is found dead beneath a disused railway line, a wad of cash still in his pocket. Banks traces Miller’s fall back to radical student politics in the 1970s and to a wealthy benefactor who would prefer old scandals stayed buried.

A stolen tractor and bloodstain in an abandoned airfield hangar seem like minor rural crimes until a delivery van crashes off an icy road, revealing a corpse that died long before impact. Banks and his team uncover killings tied to illegal meat operations and a violent criminal ring.

Newly promoted, Banks leads a historical abuse inquiry into aging celebrity Danny Caxton, accused of raping a fourteen-year-old girl in 1967. At the same time, Annie Cabbot investigates the present-day murder of a teenager, exposing grooming gangs and institutions that long protected powerful men.

At a summer wedding in the Yorkshire Dales, a sniper opens fire, killing and wounding guests. When the suspected gunman is found dead by apparent suicide, Banks is not convinced, and his search for answers uncovers an older crime that finally explains the massacre.

In the same bleak Yorkshire week, a young woman in an evening dress is found dead in a crashed car, and an older man lies lifeless on a remote lane. Both deaths look like suicides, but Banks and his team suspect a predator who preys on the lonely.

The body of a teenage Syrian refugee is discovered stuffed in a wheelie bin on a shabby Eastvale estate. As Banks probes possible hate crime, drugs, and gang connections, trafficking survivor Zelda pursues her own dangerous hunt for the men who once controlled her.

A property developer with underworld ties is found executed in a luxury house where violent pornography was filmed. While Banks and his team follow leads into Albanian organized crime, Zelda’s secret vendetta against traffickers threatens to drag him into a morally dangerous alliance.

Two timelines intertwine as Banks investigates a present-day murder linked to the unsolved 1980s killing of a young woman connected to student protests. Old surveillance files, buried betrayals, and political secrets force him to rethink what justice can look like decades later.