Jack Garrett & Laura McGanity Books in Order

The Jack Garrett and Laura McGanity books are crime thrillers built around a very useful problem. Jack is a freelance crime reporter. Laura is a detective. He needs information she can't share, and she needs him to stop charging into live investigations. That tug of war gives the series its energy from the first pages of Fallen Idols.

It starts with tension.

In Fallen Idols, a footballer's murder pulls Jack back toward his Lancashire roots and puts him on a collision course with Laura's case. From there, the series moves north and settles into Neil White's fictional Lancashire world, especially Turners Fold and the larger town of Blackley. These places matter. The books have old mill-town streets, rough edges, green hills, canals, and the feeling that everybody knows part of the story but nobody knows all of it.

The setting does a lot of work.

Each novel brings a fresh investigation, but White keeps the focus close to Jack and Laura. Lost Souls turns on missing children and eerie claims of dreams that may predict real crimes. Last Rites takes Jack into the shadow of Pendle Hill, mixing a missing woman case with the long afterlife of witchcraft legends. Dead Silent digs into a notorious disappearance from decades earlier, when a barrister vanished after his wife was found buried alive. Cold Kill closes the run with a darker serial murder case and the sense that both leads are now carrying more history, more scars, and more to lose.

What links the books is not just plot. It is the way public truth and private truth keep rubbing against each other. Jack wants the story. Laura wants evidence that will stand up. Families want answers fast. The police cannot always move fast, and the press cannot always wait. That makes the books feel part police procedural, part media thriller, and part relationship story, even when the body count rises.

Jack and Laura are not a neat double act. That is the point. They care about each other, but their jobs keep pulling them into conflict, and White gets a lot of mileage out of that friction. Jack tends to keep asking questions after sensible people would stop. Laura has to work inside the rules, even when the rules are maddening. Across the series, you watch them learn when to trust each other and when they absolutely shouldn't.

If you want fast, grounded crime novels with a strong northern sense of place, this is a good series to settle into. Start with Fallen Idols and read straight through to Cold Kill. The cases stand on their own, but the real pleasure is seeing how Jack, Laura, and their complicated partnership change under pressure.