Matthew Ryan Books in Order

The Matthew Ryan novels move away from day to day CID work into the shadowier world of Special Branch and covert operations. Set in the same North East landscape as Mari Hannah's other series, they follow Detective Sergeant Matthew Ryan as he learns how far powerful people will go to protect their secrets.

In the first book, The Silent Room, a prison van carrying Ryan's former boss, Jack Fenwick, is hijacked on the way to Durham. The prisoner vanishes and Ryan is suspended on suspicion of helping him escape. Shut out of the official manhunt, under surveillance and unsure who he can trust, he quietly pulls together a small group of allies to investigate on his own.

The deeper Ryan digs, the more he realises that Fenwick's case touches something much bigger than one corrupt officer. A suspicious death in Norway and traces of an international conspiracy put Ryan and his friends in real danger, turning the story into a chase that crosses borders as well as departmental lines.

The Death Messenger picks up with Ryan working under Detective Superintendent Eloise O'Neil in a newly formed special operations unit. Their first case begins with a mysterious DVD delivered to Northumbria Police Headquarters, showing a blood soaked lock up and narrated by an anonymous woman's voice. There is no obvious victim and no clue to where the scene was filmed.

When more recordings arrive at other forces and real bodies start to turn up, Ryan and O'Neil have to work out what links the targets and why the killer seems to be toying with them. The special unit's remit allows them to cross jurisdictional boundaries, but it also means they operate under intense scrutiny from those who would rather the truth stayed buried.

These books are tenser and more conspiracy driven than the average village murder mystery, but they keep the procedural grounding and sense of place that run through Hannah's work. They are a good choice if you like police thrillers that sit on the edge of the spy world, with a small team pitted against systems as much as against individual villains.