Martin Murphy Books in Order

The Martin Murphy novels take Colin Bateman's taste for dark comedy and drop it into the world of undercover policing. Martin Murphy is a Northern Irish officer who has seen too much, including the murder of his young son by paramilitaries, and who now works deep cover for the Metropolitan Police in London. He is clever, stubborn and reckless in the way only someone with very little to lose can be.

In Murphy's Law he fails a professional assessment, partly because of the trauma he carries, and is pushed toward a new posting in London. His first major assignment is to infiltrate a North London funeral home that doubles as a front for diamond thieves. Murphy must pose, lie and improvise his way into the gang while keeping his temper and grief in check, and the book balances the mechanics of undercover work with the messy emotions that sit underneath.

Murphy's Revenge raises the moral stakes. Murphy is asked to investigate Confront, a support group for families of murder and rape victims who seem to be doing more than holding therapy sessions. When perpetrators start turning up dead, he goes under as a bereaved relative and finds a circle of people who have real reasons to want vengeance. The book pushes him to question where justice ends and revenge begins, and what happens when the law looks the other way.

Murphy's world is rounded out by his widowed sister Kate and his old friend McBride, now a priest, who acts as a sounding board for his worst decisions. The relationships are thorny but warm, and give the books a beat of ordinary life between stakeouts, fights and narrow escapes.

The tone is punchy and often very funny, but it stays closer to straight thriller territory than some of Bateman's other work. Murphy has the same knack for one liners as Dan Starkey, yet the series looks more directly at the cost of violence on those who have to live inside it. That balance of pace, black humour and bruised humanity makes the Martin Murphy books a compact two novel run that still feels complete.