Mark Billingham Books in Order

A series of carefully planned attacks leaves Metropolitan Police officers poisoned, stabbed and terrified. As Thorne and DI Nicola Tanner dig into the victims’ chequered pasts, they uncover a vengeful campaign that forces Thorne to question the job he has devoted his life to.

Still obsessed with his wife’s unsolved murder, Miller is confronted by a young man carrying a briefcase full of severed hands, proof of a contract killing. The evidence gives him leverage over local crook Wayne Cutler, but also makes Miller a target for several ruthless players.

Grieving DS Declan Miller returns to work after his wife and ballroom partner is murdered, only to catch a double shooting in a Blackpool hotel. With new partner Sara Xiu and his circle of dance-hall friends, he follows a botched contract killing into the dangerous orbit of the Cutler crime family.

Thorne seems finally settled when a string of grotesque murders leaves victims mutilated in ways that echo “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The trail leads to a young woman enthralled by escaped killer Stuart Nicklin, forcing Thorne into a brutal reckoning that threatens everyone he loves.

Once a police officer, Alice Armitage is now a volatile patient on a locked psychiatric ward. When a fellow patient is murdered, she investigates from inside, but as deaths and doubts mount she cannot tell whether the killer or her own mind is playing tricks.

In the summer of 1996, two seven-year-old boys run from a playground into nearby woods and only one returns. DS Tom Thorne tackles the baffling disappearance while his personal life unravels, knowing every misstep may doom the missing child and those connected to him.

A woman apparently jumps in front of a train, but Thorne senses something wrong and discovers she was ruined by a charming con man. As he and DI Nicola Tanner track the fraudster, they collide with a damaged woman whose secret partnership turns the case lethal.

Someone is killing cats across London, and Thorne is ordered to take the case. When the mutilations connect to a string of unsolved strangulations, he and DI Nicola Tanner uncover a predator whose rehearsals on animals were only the beginning.

On a seaside weekend, Louise loses her mobile phone and feels her life grinding to a halt. Relief turns to dread when the stranger who found it insists on meeting alone on a deserted beach, dragging her into something far worse than digital disconnection.

After her partner is murdered, DI Nicola Tanner believes she was the real target because of her work on honour-killing cases. Working off the books with Thorne, she hunts contract killers exploiting family shame while a missing young couple’s fate hangs in the balance.

Every Monday, six addicts gather in a smart North London house to talk about the secret shames behind their compulsions. When one of them is murdered, DI Nicola Tanner must break through layers of denial and confidentiality to discover which member of the group is also a killer.

On a rare countryside break, Thorne and his partner Helen Weeks are drawn into the abduction of two schoolgirls in Helen’s Warwickshire hometown. As locals and media fixate on one suspect, Thorne doubts the evidence and races to find the remaining missing girl alive.

Imprisoned psychopath Stuart Nicklin offers to lead police to the body of a boy he killed decades ago, but only if Thorne escorts him to a remote Welsh island. Trapped there with two killers and a small team, Thorne realises he has walked into a carefully engineered game.

A playful fake history of fifty albums that never existed, this collaboration imagines outrageous side projects, disastrous concept records and unlikely duets. Each entry comes with track lists and backstory, skewering rock myths while celebrating the joy of obsessive music fandom.

This short collection shows Tom Thorne working through the darker side of the festive season, from a Father Christmas found dead beneath a tree to a retired boxer dragged back toward crime. Familiar rituals become the backdrop for desperate choices and unexpected acts of kindness.

Demoted back into uniform, Thorne notices a cluster of older people who appear to have taken their own lives. Convinced they were helped to die, he investigates off the books and uncovers a killer quietly preying on the lonely and vulnerable.

Three dark novellas explore violence, obsession and chance encounters: a boy confronting racist thugs, an affair with an abused woman that turns dangerous, and a late-night meeting in a Texas bar where two strangers slowly reveal the haunting reasons they are really there.

Three British couples become holiday friends at a Florida resort, then a teenage girl from the complex disappears and is later found murdered. Months later, as they meet for tense dinner parties back home, another girl vanishes and a young detective wonders which of the six is lying.

Police officer Helen Weeks pops into her local newsagent and walks into a hostage siege. The desperate shopkeeper demands that Thorne re-investigate his son’s supposed suicide in custody, forcing Thorne to uncover a deadly cover-up before the standoff turns fatal.

Still on the run from the Hope Organisation, Rachel and Adam follow clues left by their grandmother to the American southwest, where a remote military base and their missing father are tied to the final triskellion shard and a plan that could change them forever.

Ten years after she is jailed for arranging her husband’s murder, a woman receives a photograph suggesting he is alive and well abroad. Hired to uncover the truth, Thorne chases a charming but ruthless criminal who faked his death and will kill again to stay hidden.

After the events in Triskellion, twins Rachel and Adam are supposedly safe within a scientific project that claims to study their abilities. They soon realise they are prisoners instead, and must flee across Europe while hunted by fanatics and the sinister Hope Project.

When a pregnant woman is murdered in her flat, Thorne expects a grim domestic case until a bloodstained X-ray fragment in her hand links the crime to a notorious serial killer from the past. Someone is now targeting the children of that killer’s original victims.

Fourteen-year-old twins Rachel and Adam swap New York for a remote English village where locals are hostile and an ancient three-bladed symbol carved into the hills seems to pulse with power. An archaeological dig and a swarm of bees lead them toward a buried secret tied to their family.

A gang initiation shooting on a rainy London night sends a pregnant woman’s car into a bus stop, killing Detective Sergeant Paul Hopwood. Refusing to accept his death as random, Detective Constable Helen Weeks follows his last steps into a world where gangland deals and police loyalties blur.

Photographs of murder victims begin arriving on Thorne’s mobile phone before the bodies are found. As he identifies the dead and traces them back to a prison gang feud, he realises a manipulative killer he once put away is orchestrating revenge from his cell.

Sixteen-year-old Luke Mullen, son of a former senior police officer, vanishes after getting into a stranger’s car. Seconded to the Kidnap Unit, Thorne uncovers links to an old hate crime and a dangerous offender with unsettling access to people inside the force.

A run of brutal attacks on homeless men, each kicked to death and left with cash pinned to their clothes, pulls a burnt-out Thorne off desk duty. Going undercover on London’s streets, he discovers the murders may be tied to a buried military atrocity.

An unsolved case in which a schoolgirl was burned alive comes back to haunt a retired detective just as a North London gang war flares up. Thorne is drawn into both the decades-old arson and the present-day turf battle before more bodies fall.

Convicted rapists are being found bound, tortured and murdered soon after their release from prison. As public sympathy wavers, Thorne must work out whether a vigilante is cleansing the streets or someone is using old crimes to hide a far more personal revenge.

DI Tom Thorne hunts a killer who is not trying to murder his victims but to leave them alive and trapped inside their own bodies. When one young woman survives with locked-in syndrome, she becomes the only witness who cannot speak.

Two women are strangled on the same day in different parts of London, echoing an earlier pair of murders. Thorne realises he is facing not one serial killer but two working in tandem, bound together by a chilling understanding of fear.

At a slightly ramshackle medieval academy for trainee knights, a misfit scholarship boy struggles with sword practice, impossible lessons and a swaggering bully. When real danger threatens the school, he has to find the courage to prove he belongs.