Luca Veste Books in Order

If you want the original Liverpool police series: Dead Gone → The Dying Place → Bloodstream → Then She Was Gone
If you want his creepiest standalone: The Bone Keeper
If you like guilt, secrets, and friendships under strain: The Six
If you want newer standalones built on secrets and pressure: You Never Said Goodbye → The Game → Trust In Me
If you want the newer Liverpool crime books: Liar Liar → Tell Tale

Luca Veste grew up in Liverpool in a big family, with an English mother and an Italian father. He was one of nine children, and that mix of Scouse life, family noise, and Italian roots still shows up in the way he writes about loyalty, pressure, and the darker corners of ordinary lives.

Liverpool never really leaves his books.

As a kid, he wanted to be a footballer or a boxer. Life took him elsewhere. Before writing full time, he worked as a musician and actor, then spent seven years in the civil service. At 28, wanting something different, he left that job and went to university in Liverpool to study psychology and criminology. Those subjects turned out to be ideal raw material for a crime writer.

He did not begin with a tidy long-term plan to become a novelist. First he was a serious reader, then a blogger, launching the Guilty Conscience site in 2011 as a place to review books and interview writers. That led him into short stories, then into editing the charity anthology Off The Record. He has said that once he started writing fiction for himself, he was hooked.

A psychology lecture helped set everything in motion. Veste has said that learning about unethical experiments gave him the spark for Dead Gone, his debut and the first book in the DI Murphy and DS Rossi series. He wrote it while studying, and his first novel was published during his second year at university. From the outside, that rise looked quick. In reality, it came with rewrites, rejected drafts, and the kind of stubbornness that tends to matter more than people admit.

That mix of psychology, crime, and ordinary people making terrible choices has stayed with him ever since.

Many readers start with the Murphy and Rossi books, Dead Gone, The Dying Place, Bloodstream, and Then She Was Gone. They are police procedurals, but they also lean hard into the mental side of crime, obsession, guilt, fear, and the stories people tell themselves when things go wrong. Liverpool is not just a backdrop in those novels. It feels lived in, specific, and sometimes darkly funny.

His standalones stretch the same interests in new directions. The Bone Keeper turns a childhood legend into a terrifying investigation. The Six traps a group of friends inside one secret that will not stay buried. You Never Said Goodbye, The Game, Trust In Me, and The Stranger in the Room move closer to psychological suspense, with family histories, hidden crimes, and characters trying to keep control while everything around them starts to slide.

Away from the novels, he has also co-edited True Brit Grit, played bass in the Fun Lovin' Crime Writers band, and co-hosted the podcast Two Crime Writers and a Microphone. He has been active in the wider crime-writing world for years, not just as a novelist but as someone who likes building conversations around books.

These days he lives in Liverpool with his wife and two daughters. That feels fitting. Even when his stories get very dark, they are usually grounded in real places, real relationships, and the small human details that make the trouble hit harder.