Mark Sennen Books in Order

If you want the Charlotte Savage series from the beginning: Touch → Bad Blood → Cut Dead
If you want Savage at her darkest and most personal: Tell Tale → Two Evils → The Boneyard → Puppet
If you want a fast spy thriller: The Sanction → Rogue Target
If you prefer a standalone: The Sum of All Sins
If you want a short prequel first: The Boat House → Touch

Mark Sennen was born in Surrey and went to school in Guildford, but a lot of his real growing up happened later on a smallholding in rural Shropshire. It was a quiet, remote place, the kind where a trip to the cinema meant a long drive and local dances still happened in village halls. He has said those years taught him practical jobs too, including driving tractors and worming sheep.

He went on to study in Birmingham, reading Cultural Studies, and later started a PhD in Brighton before deciding academic life was not for him. Long before he became a novelist, he moved through a string of jobs and half-jobs, including farming, drumming, and computer programming. That mix of rural life, music, and tech gives his background an unusual shape.

He did not take a straight road into writing.

In 2011, when programming work had slowed, he wrote and self-published Touch. That first Charlotte Savage novel introduced readers to a stubborn Plymouth detective and a dark West Country case, and the book found a wide audience online before being picked up by HarperCollins. What began as an indie release became the start of the series he is still best known for.

The Charlotte Savage books remain the center of his bibliography. In Touch, Bad Blood, Tell Tale, The Boneyard, and Puppet, readers get police procedurals with real momentum, messy emotions, and cases that often push close to Charlotte's home life. People who like these books tend to mention the pace, the unsettling villains, and the way Sennen uses Devon and Plymouth as more than just scenery.

Place matters in his books.

Sennen nearly set Charlotte's world in Brighton, but chose Devon instead, close to where he lives. That decision gives the series its own feel. Plymouth, Dartmoor, the coast, isolated farms, back roads, reservoirs, and estuaries all help shape the tension. The landscape can be beautiful, but it also makes people easy to hide, hard to find, and even harder to understand.

He has not stayed in one lane, either. The Sum of All Sins shifts into psychological suspense, following a couple who move from London to a remote Devon farm and discover that a fresh start is not always a clean one. Then The Sanction and Rogue Target open up into spy fiction, pairing intelligence analyst Stephen Holm with former sniper Rebecca da Silva. Those books keep his knack for pressure and pace, but move it into the world of terrorism, covert work, and bad decisions made in high places.

Across the different books, some patterns keep coming back. Sennen likes damaged people who are still trying to do the right thing. He likes institutions under strain, secrets that refuse to stay buried, and characters forced into choices that get morally messy very fast. Even when the stories get dark, the prose stays direct and readable, which is probably one reason readers tend to move through the books quickly.

He now lives with his wife and children in rural South Devon, not far from Plymouth and close to the sea, and writes full-time in a garden shed that used to be his web developer's workspace. Home life seems to suit him. So does writing about places that look calm on the surface and turn out to hold far more trouble than anyone expected.