Luke Delaney Books in Order

If you want the main DI Sean Corrigan arc: Cold Killing → The Keeper → The Toy Taker → The Jackdaw → A Killing Mind
If you like origin stories and short reads: Redemption of the Dead → The Network → The Rain Killer → An Imperfect Killing → Cold Killing
If you prefer grittier, standalone thrillers: The Rule of Fear → The Killing Boys → Senseless
If you want a single, high-stakes case to try him out: Cold Killing works well as a one-off introduction.
If you’re curious about Jack King alongside Corrigan: Read Cold Killing and The Keeper, then switch to The Rule of Fear before returning to the later Corrigan books.

Luke Delaney writes dark, London-set crime fiction rooted in the realities of police work. Before publishing novels, he spent years as an officer in the Metropolitan Police, much of it in CID investigating serious violent crime. He now uses that experience to build stories that feel like you are standing in the incident room beside his detectives.

Delaney joined the Met in the late 1980s as a young constable posted to a notoriously tough patch of South East London. The area was known for high levels of street violence, gang activity, and domestic abuse, and he learned the job in an environment where things could turn dangerous very quickly. Those early years sharpened his instincts and gave him a close-up view of the damage violent crime leaves behind.

Most of his police career was spent in CID, dealing with everything from fledgling serial killers to gangland executions. For more than a decade he worked long shifts on some of the roughest streets in South London, gaining detailed knowledge of how investigations are actually run.

That front-line experience sits right at the heart of his fiction.

Eventually, the long hours, low pay, and strain on family life pushed him to leave the job he still speaks about with respect. Stepping away from the force gave him space to pursue an older ambition, to write the kind of crime novel he had always wanted to read. The result was Cold Killing, published in 2013, which introduced readers to DI Sean Corrigan and a serial killer who leaves almost no forensic trace.

Corrigan quickly became Delaney’s signature character, a South London detective whose own abusive childhood allows him to sense the darkness in others. Across novels like The Keeper, The Toy Taker, The Jackdaw, and A Killing Mind, Corrigan leads high-pressure investigations while trying to balance family life and the toll of what he sees. The books follow him through brutal murder scenes, fraught interviews, and clashes with senior officers who do not always share his gut-level certainty. Shorter pieces such as Redemption of the Dead, The Network, The Rain Killer, and An Imperfect Killing fill in earlier episodes from Corrigan’s career.

Delaney has also stepped outside the Corrigan series to explore other corners of the criminal justice system. The Rule of Fear centres on Sergeant Jack King, an ambitious uniformed officer asked to clean up a failing London estate while quietly losing his grip under the weight of trauma and temptation. In The Killing Boys, DS Fraser Harvey lives with the legacy of a shocking child murder case and the release of the killers years later. Senseless introduces DI Ruben Jameson, who chases a damaged killer whose ruined senses make him one of the strangest suspects Jameson has ever faced.

Across these stories, Delaney gravitates toward moral grey areas. His detectives are often forced to weigh procedure against intuition, and to confront how much violence and darkness they can absorb before something inside them shifts. The London he describes is full of estates, back alleys, interview rooms, and late-night briefings, with procedural detail that reflects his time in the job.

He likes to show what happens to ordinary officers when the pressure never really lets up.

Today Delaney writes under a pseudonym and keeps his private identity out of the spotlight, in part because so much of his experience comes from real investigations. Away from the desk he has spoken about enjoying sport, film, quality television, and reading history. The mix of lived police work and a reader’s love of crime fiction has helped him build stories that feel authentic, tense, and firmly grounded in the world of modern policing.