John Steele Books in Order

For the Jackie Shaw novels: Ravenhill → Seven Skins → Dry River
For the Callum Burke books: Rat Island → The Sky Turned Black
If you want to try one book first: Ravenhill

John Steele is the Belfast-born crime novelist behind the Jackie Shaw and Callum Burke books. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the 1970s and grew up in a city where politics, memory, and violence were never far from daily life. That background feeds straight into his fiction, especially the Belfast streets and uneasy loyalties of Ravenhill.

Before he published novels, Steele had a life that moved around a lot. At twenty two, in 1995, he left Belfast and went to the United States. After that he lived and worked across three continents, including long stretches in Hungary and Japan. Along the way he worked as a drummer in a rock band, an illustrator, a truck driver, and a teacher of English. He has also spoken about stocking lakes and rivers in Ireland with fish, which tells you something about how varied his working life has been.

He came to novel writing later than many authors do. He had already placed short stories in North American magazines and fiction digests, but the push to finish a full novel came from two very personal things. One was a bet from a friend who said he could not write a novel before his daughter was born. The other was the daughter herself, Hana. Steele has said that writing about Belfast felt like a way to help her understand the place he came from.

Sometimes a writing career starts with ambition. His started with a dare.

That first novel became Ravenhill, the opening Jackie Shaw book. It introduced readers to a damaged, morally tangled protagonist moving through Belfast before and after the Troubles. Readers who respond to Steele usually like that mix of pressure, place, and conscience. Seven Skins takes Jackie into London and builds around a hit list, assassins, and a man who keeps getting dragged back into other people's wars. Dry River pushes the series into northern Japan, where a killing in Sapporo leads Jackie into trouble with a serial murderer and the yakuza.

He later opened a second strand of crime fiction with Callum Burke. In Rat Island, Burke arrives in 1995 New York from Hong Kong to work undercover against organised crime links stretching between Chinatown and the Irish mob. The Sky Turned Black keeps that hard city feel, this time in Manhattan in 1997, with Burke facing a case that starts with a routine raid and widens into something far uglier. These books appeal to readers who like police stories with international reach, bruised protagonists, and a strong sense of how a city actually feels at street level.

Place matters in his books.

Belfast, London, New York, and Japan are not just backdrops in Steele's fiction. They shape the danger, the loyalties, and the choices his characters make. Again and again, he writes about people carrying old damage, about the blur between cops and criminals, and about how violence never really stays in the past, even when the world insists on moving on.

Steele now lives in England with his wife and daughter. He has described himself as a late starter, both as a writer and as a father, and there is something fitting about that. His books feel lived in. They are full of men who have seen too much, cities that do not forget, and people trying, not always successfully, to make a life after the worst part should be over.