Matthew MR Hall Books in Order

If you want the main series from the beginning: The Coroner → The Disappeared → The Redeemed
If you want a quick introduction to Jenny: The Innocent → The Coroner
If you like conspiracy-driven cases: The Flight → The Chosen Dead → The Burning
If you want the military-themed later novel: A Life to Kill / The Last Post
If you want a standalone thriller: The Black Art of Killing

Matthew M.R. Hall grew up on the border of England and Wales, a landscape of valleys, small towns, and open country that later found its way into much of his fiction. He studied law at Worcester College, Oxford, then spent several years working as a barrister in London. That training stayed with him. It gave him a sharp feel for institutions, procedure, and the quiet human wreckage official decisions can leave behind.

The law gave him material. Writing gave him a better way to use it.

Hall moved into television first. After several years in practice, he began writing episodes of Kavanagh QC, then created Wing and a Prayer, a legal drama that earned a BAFTA nomination. Over the next two decades he wrote more than sixty hours of prime-time British drama, later winning a BAFTA Cymru for Keeping Faith. Even when the settings changed, his work kept circling the same questions: who gets heard, who gets ignored, and what happens when systems start protecting themselves.

His move into crime novels felt natural. In The Coroner, he introduced Jenny Cooper, a former lawyer turned coroner in the Severn Vale, and gave crime fiction a lead character who works not as a detective or pathologist but as the person trying to establish the truth after death. Readers liked the legal texture, the emotional weight, and the way Hall let private grief sit right beside public scandal. The Coroner was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger, and The Flight would be shortlisted for the same prize a few years later.

Jenny Cooper became the center of Hall's best-known fiction. In books like The Disappeared, The Redeemed, The Burning, and the prequel novella The Innocent, he mixes investigation with family strain, politics, secrecy, and the long shadow of past mistakes. The cases are often big, involving the police, the church, the military, or government agencies, but the books never lose sight of the people left behind.

He likes stories where the official version never quite adds up.

Hall has also written outside the Jenny Cooper world. The Black Art of Killing shifts into a tougher thriller mode, following former SAS officer Leo Black as his carefully rebuilt academic life in Oxford is dragged back toward violence and conspiracy. Even there, the familiar Hall themes are still in place: duty, conscience, buried truth, and the cost of survival. He writes fast-moving plots, but he is just as interested in what pressure does to a person's mind.

Place matters in his work, too. Bristol, the Wye Valley, the Welsh border, and other western landscapes give many of his novels their shape and mood. They are beautiful places, but never postcard scenery. In Hall's fiction, landscape usually carries memory, tension, and old damage right alongside the suspense. That grounded sense of place is part of why the Jenny Cooper books translated so well to television, later inspiring the series Coroner.

He now lives in the Wye Valley on the border of England and Wales with his wife, the journalist and former lawyer Patricia Carswell, and their two sons. Away from the desk, he has long cared about woodland and countryside conservation, and he has also spoken about another interest that feels very different but oddly apt, amateur boxing. It suits the books. They are thoughtful, but they know how to land a punch.