Marnie Riches Books in Order

If you want her signature international crime series: The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die → The Girl Who Broke the Rules → The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows
If you want a modern police procedural: All the Pretty Ones → The Silent Dead
If you want gritty Manchester gangland drama: Born Bad → The Cover Up
If you want a private investigator with dark humour: Tightrope → Backlash
If you want her lighter, cozier side: The Gardeners' Club

Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester, in a working-class world that shows up again and again in her fiction. She later swapped the view of nearby Strangeways for Cambridge University, where she studied German and Dutch and earned a master's degree. That mix of North West grit and European outlook has shaped a lot of what she writes.

She did not take a straight line into publishing. Before crime fiction became her full-time job, she has said she was a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist and a professional fundraiser. She also wrote a first novel while she was at university, a very early attempt based on a medieval Dutch story.

It then sat in a wardrobe for seventeen years.

The real turn came later, when she was tired of her day job, the property market had crashed, and writing stopped feeling like a nice idea and started feeling necessary. She began working seriously on fiction and learned fast. Her first published books were historical adventures for younger readers, written under the pseudonym Chris Blake, a useful apprenticeship in pace, structure and hitting a brief.

Her breakthrough under her own name came with The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die in 2015. That book introduced Georgina, or George, McKenzie, an impulsive young criminologist drawn into a violent Amsterdam case with Dutch detective Paul van den Bergen. Readers who click with Riches usually like the same things, fast plots, strong settings, social anger, and heroines who refuse to stay safely on the sidelines.

She did not stop there.

With Born Bad and The Cover Up, she turned back toward Manchester and wrote gangland novels rooted in family loyalties, territorial wars and the city's rough edges. Tightrope launched a different kind of lead, private investigator Bev Saunders, funny, scrappy and forever one bad decision away from trouble. Then All the Pretty Ones introduced Jackie Cooke, a detective whose cases hit especially hard because of her own family history. Much later, The Gardeners' Club showed another side of her work, still full of secrets and sharp observation, but warmer, lighter and built around a community of amateur sleuths.

Place matters a lot in her books.

Amsterdam, Manchester, Hale, and the wider North West are never just backdrops. Riches tends to write about people under pressure, vulnerable women, children at risk, families carrying old damage, and institutions that do not always protect the people who need them most. Even in the darker books, there is usually a streak of dry humour and a clear interest in why people make bad choices, or desperate ones.

She also writes historical saga fiction as Maggie Campbell, which gives you a good sense of her range. Alongside her fiction, she has taught academic writing for the Royal Literary Fund, worked with writers at Cambridge, and tutored the Faber novel writing course. Off the page, gardening is one of her big passions, which makes perfect sense once you see how naturally she can move from murder scenes to flowerbeds.