Kerry Kaya Books in Order

If you want to start with the Carter family saga: Under Dog / Barking Boy → Top Dog → Scorned → The Reckoning
If you prefer East End gangland romance and betrayal: The Price → The Score
If family driven Tempests drama appeals: Betrayal → Revenge
If you like next generation crime family stories: Downfall → Retribution
If you want a standalone revenge thriller: The Reprisal

Kerry Kaya writes Essex based gangland thrillers that always come back to family, loyalty, and the choices people make when money and fear are on the table. Her books follow crime families through years of trouble, but they never lose sight of the home lives behind the headlines.

She grew up on one of the largest council estates in the United Kingdom, surrounded by tight knit streets where everyone knew everyone else. That mix of hard times, humour, and community spirit feeds straight into her fiction, which often takes place on the same kind of estates she remembers from childhood.

As a kid she filled exercise books with made up stories and wrote her first book when she was about ten.

In her twenties she finally finished a full length novel and began to see herself as a writer, even if she was not ready to show the work to the world. She loved crime fiction, especially novels by women, and devoured books by writers such as Mo Hayder, Lynda La Plante, and Martina Cole. Their influence shows in the way she blends pace, tension, and complex women who refuse to stay in the background.

Kaya's early gangland tale Barking Boy introduced readers to Tommy Carter and his brothers and later reappeared in revised form as Under Dog. Over time those characters grew into the Carter Brothers series, where a family of brothers from an Essex estate claw their way up through the ranks of organised crime. She then expanded the Carter story even further with Downfall and Retribution, which follow the next generation trying to live with the family name.

Alongside the Carters she created other linked series. The Harry Fletcher books, starting with The Price and The Score, track a street smart fixer who risks everything for love and then has to face the fallout decades later. The Tempests novels, beginning with Betrayal and Revenge, focus on Tracey Tempest and her sons as they deal with the violent legacy of husband and father Terry. Her standalone novel The Reprisal offers another angle on revenge, this time from the point of view of a woman whose comfortable life is ripped apart in a single night.

Despite all this fictional crime, Kaya's day job could not be more different. She works full time in a busy maternity department for the NHS, meeting families at one of the most intense moments of their lives. That experience keeps her grounded and gives her a steady stream of small human details that slip quietly into her stories.

When she is not writing or working shifts, she likes to read, watch football, and switch off with crime dramas like Peaky Blinders, Luther, and true crime documentaries.

She is a long standing supporter of West Ham United and is open about her love of good food, especially Indian dishes. All of that everyday life sits alongside the darker worlds in her novels and helps explain why readers care so much about the characters, even when those characters are planning heists or settling scores. For many fans, picking up a new Kerry Kaya book feels like dropping back in with a chaotic, dangerous, but oddly familiar family.