Lee Weeks Books in Order

If you want dark Hong Kong thrillers: The Trophy Taker → The Trafficked → Death Trip → Kiss & Die
If you prefer London murder squad cases: Dead of Winter → Cold as Ice → Frozen Grave
If you like past crimes coming back to bite: Cold Justice → Cold Killers → Cold Revenge

Lee Weeks was born in Devon to Welsh parents. Her father worked as a detective, her mother was a nurse, and the family moved often while she was growing up.

She has said that she left school at seventeen with one art qualification and a strong urge to see more of the world.

That urge took her a long way from home. Weeks spent seven years working her way around Europe and Southeast Asia. She was an au pair in Sweden, worked in bars in Germany, DJed in Bavaria, and picked up other jobs as she went. By the summer of 1982 she had reached Hong Kong, still young, short on money, and looking for work.

Hong Kong changed everything.

Weeks later wrote openly about how dangerous that period became, with hostess-club work, heroin addiction, and pressure from the Triads all becoming part of her life before she managed to get back to Britain. Those experiences did not stay neatly in the past. They gave her firsthand knowledge of fear, power, and survival, and that hard edge shows up again and again in her fiction, especially in the Hong Kong underworld of The Trophy Taker, The Trafficked, Death Trip, and Kiss & Die.

Back in the UK, she settled in London, married, and raised two children. Along the way she worked as an English teacher and as a personal fitness trainer. Then she turned seriously to fiction. Her debut novel, The Trophy Taker, arrived in 2008 and introduced Detective Johnny Mann, a troubled Hong Kong cop moving through a world of trafficking, gang violence, and old loyalties. More Johnny Mann books followed quickly, and readers who like fast plots, dangerous settings, and detectives carrying plenty of baggage found a lot to latch onto.

What readers often respond to in Weeks's books is how physical they feel. Her stories move through back streets, bars, canal paths, rented houses, and grim police interviews. She writes about people under pressure, women at risk, men with divided loyalties, and crimes that tend to reach back into the past. Even when the plots are large, the pull usually comes from damaged characters trying to stay upright for one more day.

In 2012 she started a second major strand of her crime fiction with Dead of Winter, the first book to focus on Ebony Willis and Dan Carter in the London Murder Squad. That series, which also includes Cold as Ice, Frozen Grave, Cold Justice, Cold Killers, and Cold Revenge, shifts the action from Hong Kong to London and beyond, but keeps the same interest in buried secrets, social damage, and the long afterlife of violence. The books became Sunday Times bestsellers.

These days Weeks lives in Devon, which brings her story back to where it began. Alongside the novels, she has built a parallel career in painting, producing abstract and landscape work, and she has also written journalism and copy. She has shared writing advice on her blog too, which fits the rest of her career, practical, direct, and shaped by experience.