Katerina Diamond Books in Order

If you want to follow DS Imogen Grey from the start: The Teacher → The Secret → The Angel → The Promise → Truth or die
If you like intense, emotionally charged later cases: Woman in the Water → Trick or Treat
If you prefer standalone psychological suspense: The Heatwave
If you want a dark standalone about surviving an attack: The Silence

Katerina Diamond writes dark, twisty crime novels that live at the point where small communities and big secrets collide. Born in the 1970s in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, she grew up around a close Greek community and a busy family fish and chip shop. That mix of cultures, gossip and late night customers quietly gave her an eye for how people behave when they think no one is watching.

Her family later moved to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, where she was thrown into a local school without speaking the language. Within six months she was fluent in Greek, an early sign of the way she listens closely to how people talk. The sense of being between countries and accents shows up again and again in her characters.

After her parents divorced, the family settled back in England, this time in Devon. Diamond finished school there and spent time working in her uncle's fish and chip shop, serving regulars and tourists and watching the quiet dramas of everyday life. The Devon landscape, from city streets to coastal towns, would later become the backdrop for many of her novels.

She went on, briefly, to the University of Derby. While she did not stay long in formal study, that move changed everything, because it was there she met the man who would become her husband. The couple eventually had two children, and Diamond built her writing life around family moves and school runs rather than around a traditional literary career.

Writing was always in the background.

For years she experimented with stories and scripts, teaching herself how to structure a film and even collaborating online with a friend to produce a huge television pilot script. Those early projects stayed in a drawer, but they gave her practice in building pace, scenes and cliffhangers.

A break in internet access and a local women's writing group nudged her toward prose. Asked to produce a novella length piece and then an opening chapter for a competition, she started exploring a story about a woman whose life had gone badly wrong. That material grew and darkened until it became the seed of her debut crime novel, The Teacher.

Published in 2016, The Teacher introduces DS Imogen Grey and DS Adrian Miles, detectives in Exeter investigating a string of brutal deaths linked to an elite school. The book quickly climbed the charts, becoming a Sunday Times bestseller and a number one Kindle title, and it picked up short listings for major crime awards. Readers were drawn to its mix of graphic crimes, moral questions and damaged but determined investigators.

Diamond has since continued the DS Imogen Grey series with titles such as The Secret, The Angel, The Promise, Truth or die, Woman in the Water and Trick or Treat. Across the series she follows Imogen and Adrian through complex cases that touch on human trafficking, vigilantism, campus politics and family violence. The books combine police procedure with ongoing character arcs, so that each case also pushes the detectives to face their own pasts.

Alongside the series, she has written standalone psychological thrillers including The Heatwave and The Silence. These stories step away from the police and focus on ordinary people haunted by a single terrible night, a missing child or an attack nobody believed. They share the same interest in memory, guilt and the ways small towns close ranks around their secrets.

Certain threads run through all of Diamond's work.

Her stories return to survivors trying to reclaim control, institutions that fail the vulnerable, and the complicated bonds between partners, friends and families. Her settings feel grounded, whether she is writing about Exeter back streets, smart university offices or a seaside town in the middle of a suffocating summer. She does not shy away from violence, but she is just as interested in what happens to people afterwards.

Now living on the East Kent coast with her husband and children, Diamond continues to build her crime list from home. In personal essays she has written about persistence, deadlines and turning up at the desk even on days when the story feels stubborn. That steady work has built a body of crime fiction that keeps readers turning pages late into the night.