Maura Ryan Books in Order

The Maura Ryan books follow one of Martina Cole’s most iconic characters: a clever East End girl who grows up to rule London’s underworld and discovers how lonely power can be.

The series begins with Dangerous Lady, a gangland family saga that opens in 1950s London. Maura is born into the Ryan clan, a poor Irish Catholic family crammed into a small terraced house where money is tight and tempers are short. Her older brothers drift from petty crime into serious rackets, and everyone assumes Maura will stay in the background, marry well and look the other way.

Instead, she proves to be the sharpest mind in the family. As the Ryans move into protection, clubs and high‑stakes robberies, Maura steps from the kitchen into the backroom meetings, learning how to read men who underestimate her. Cole shows her world in vivid detail – smoky clubs, cramped pubs, council estates and police stations where the Ryans’ name is known and feared.

At the heart of the story is a tension between love and loyalty. Maura falls for Terry Patterson, an honest cop whose job is to put people like her away. Their relationship is passionate and impossible, pulling her towards a different life even as her loyalty to her brothers drags her deeper into crime. That clash between the man she loves and the family she cannot abandon drives much of the drama in Dangerous Lady.

Maura's Game picks up years later, when Maura has walked away from London and the empire she helped build. She has money, distance and the chance of a quieter life, but the underworld never truly lets her go. New players are moving onto her old territory, old enemies are nursing grudges and some people are foolish enough to believe the legend of the “dangerous lady” was exaggerated.

When threats close in on the people she cares about, Maura is dragged back into a city that has changed but still remembers her name. Older, richer and more cautious, she has more to lose than ever before. The book asks whether someone who has seen so much violence can ever truly step away, or whether the Life always demands one last reckoning.

Across the two novels, Cole traces Maura’s journey from teenage outsider to queen of the streets and finally to a woman who understands the personal cost of every decision she has made. The books are packed with the themes that define Martina Cole’s work – fierce family loyalty, Catholic guilt, class anger and the blurred line between victim and villain – but anchored by a single unforgettable heroine.

For readers who like their crime fiction big, emotional and unafraid of moral grey areas, the Maura Ryan stories offer a complete rise‑and‑fall saga in just two books. They are a perfect starting point if you want to see Martina Cole at her most sweeping, romantic and ruthless.