Mayhem Books in Order

The Mayhem trilogy is a raw, biker-centred prequel to the Dividing Line saga. Set in and around Manchester, it focuses on Jules Parker, better known by her road name Venom, a fearsome member of the one percenter motorcycle club Lucifer’s Shadow. These books show how the Maguire–Law underworld looked before the events of Dividing Line, and how a different kind of family lives by its own brutal code.

Jules has grown up inside the club. The bikers are her brothers, her protection and, often, her prison. When club president Jasper throws Lucifer’s Shadow behind Alex Maguire – an unstable and vicious player in the wider Maguire clan – in a brewing gang war, Jules finds her loyalties under unbearable strain. Supporting the club means siding with a man she knows is poison.

Complicating everything is a secret Jules can tell no one. She is related by blood not just to the Maguires but also to their closest allies, the Laws. That hidden lineage pulls her in two directions at once. She wants to stand with the men who raised her, but she also understands all too well what the Maguires and Laws can do when cornered.

Across Venom, Dark Heart and Poison, Atkinson charts Jules’s struggle to decide who she really is. The violence escalates from street-level showdowns to open war, and every choice she makes has a cost in lives. The trilogy is frank about the appeal of biker brotherhood – the freedom of the road, the fierce sense of belonging – but it never shies away from the misogyny, addiction and bloodshed that come with it.

For readers already invested in the Dividing Line books, Mayhem fills in crucial backstory about figures who later stride through Manchester’s underworld. For newcomers, it offers a self-contained, fast-paced slice of gangland fiction with a tough but painfully human woman at its centre.