Jonas Holly Books in Order

The Jonas Holly series takes place in and around Shipcott, a tiny village tucked into the folds of Exmoor. Across three linked novels, Belinda Bauer uses this out-of-the-way place to ask what happens when extraordinary violence breaks into ordinary rural life.

Jonas himself begins as the village constable, young enough to know most of his neighbours by name and close enough to feel every loss. At home he is caring for his wife Lucy, whose serious illness quietly shapes his choices. His job is to keep the peace, not to chase headline-making killers, and that gap between his training and what he is asked to face becomes one of the series' driving tensions.

Blacklands introduces the world from a child's point of view. Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb spends his afternoons digging on the moor, hunting for the body of an uncle believed to have been murdered years earlier by a paedophile who is now in prison. Jonas appears on the edge of the story as the local policeman, watching the same tight-lipped community that has lived for decades in the shadow of an unburied crime.

In Darkside Jonas steps into the centre of the narrative. A vulnerable woman is found murdered in her bed during a bitter winter, and an abrasive detective from outside the area sweeps in to take over the inquiry. Jonas is pushed aside, haunted by anonymous notes that blame him for failing to protect his neighbours, and torn between duty to the investigation and his need to look after Lucy. The feeling of being watched, and of not quite trusting your own judgment, gives the book its uneasy pulse.

Finders Keepers widens the canvas. In high summer children begin vanishing from parked cars across Exmoor, each disappearance marked only by a chilling note accusing the parents of not loving their child. Jonas, still shaken by what has already happened in Shipcott, is drawn back into frontline policing alongside Detective Inspector Reynolds. Steven Lamb is older now, trying to move on, yet he and his family are again pulled into the mystery, showing how hard it is to escape the ripples of an earlier crime.

Together these books build a picture of a place where everyone thinks they know everyone else, yet secrets sit just below the surface. The tone is dark but not joyless; Bauer threads in dry humour, small domestic moments and the everyday graft of police work. Readers who follow the series in order see Jonas evolve from a quiet village bobby into a man tested far beyond his comfort zone, and they watch Shipcott itself change as fear, suspicion and, sometimes, resilience reshape the community.