LS9 Books in Order

The LS9 series, also called the John Ray series, is a set of Yorkshire crime novels centered on John Ray. He is a successful Leeds businessman and the son of Antonio “Tony” Ray, a local crime boss. John wants a life apart from his father’s criminal world, but family history keeps putting him close to people, secrets, and violence he would rather leave behind.

He is not a police officer. That is part of the problem.

John becomes an amateur investigator because each case lands uncomfortably close to home. His lover is a police officer, so the books often run two investigations side by side: John follows his own leads while the official inquiry moves in a different direction. That creates tension, especially when John’s past, his father’s reputation, or his own choices make the police suspicious of him.

In Hope Road, a young woman is found dead in John’s car alongside a large stash of counterfeit money. Determined to clear the name of a friend who is being framed, John starts looking for the killer. The case forces him to face how hard it is to separate himself from the criminal connections he thought he had escaped.

Father and Son starts with the murder of an old associate of Tony Ray. There is no clear motive, but everyone agrees that the police should be kept away. John’s search leads back to events from twenty years earlier and to a crime that still has the power to hurt the people connected to it.

In The Communion of Saints, John is asked to discreetly look into abuse allegations linked to a Leeds Catholic boys’ home and a prominent businessman. What begins as a sensitive inquiry expands into blackmail, kidnapping, and murder. It also gives people within the police, already hostile to John, a chance to use the case against him.

The series brings a noir mood to Leeds without losing sight of the city’s particular character. These are procedurals, but the heart of the books is John’s uneasy place between ordinary life and his father’s legacy. Read them in order, starting with Hope Road, to follow the growing consequences of that conflict.