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Meg Gardiner Books in Order

Explore Meg Gardiner books in order, with quick summaries, series guides for Evan Delaney, Jo Beckett, and UNSUB, plus tips on where to start.

Last updated: July 3, 2026

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17 books

China Lake

by Meg Gardiner

2002

Evan Delaney learns her unstable ex-sister-in-law has joined a religious cult and plans to reclaim her son. Trying to stop a possible abduction pulls Evan into murder and a much darker fight.

Jericho Point

by Meg Gardiner

2004

A dead woman on a California beach is identified as Evan Delaney, even though Evan is very much alive. An identity thief has left her facing murder suspicion, angry criminals, and danger that reaches Jesse.

Mission Canyon

by Meg Gardiner

2004

After Jesse Blackburn and his friend are hit by a driver on a Santa Barbara road, Jesse wants revenge and Evan wants the truth. As witnesses start dying, the crash looks less like an accident and more like a cover-up.

Crosscut

by Meg Gardiner

2005

Evan returns to the China Lake military base for her high school reunion and finds a disturbing pattern, classmates keep dying young. When another reunion guest is brutally killed, she has to uncover what her graduating class has been hiding.

Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

2006

When Evan's father vanishes, police think he ran to escape prosecution, but she suspects something tied to his Naval Intelligence past. Then a federal agent dies during an attack on Evan, putting her on the run as she searches for the truth.

The Dirty Secrets Club

by Meg Gardiner

2008

San Francisco is rattled by a string of public murder-suicides, and forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett is asked to reconstruct the victims' lives. Her work points to a secretive circle of wealthy people, and soon the case reaches into her own buried past.

The Memory Collector

by Meg Gardiner

2009

Jo Beckett is called to meet a flight from London where one passenger is disoriented, frightened, and full of fragmentary clues. His broken memory may be the only way to stop a biological disaster in San Francisco.

The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

2010

A controversial singer is murdered onstage, and Jo Beckett suspects the killing is more than celebrity tragedy. Because the victim was also the president's ex-wife, rumors and hidden agendas race toward a national crisis.

The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

2011

A birthday present becomes a nightmare when an urban reality game turns into a real kidnapping. As Jo Beckett and Gabe Quintana are drawn in, they realize the criminals are counting on everyone dismissing the victims' screams as part of the show.

Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

2012

Rory Mackenzie returns to her California hometown as a juror on a murder trial she never wanted to see. Old memories, a lost love, and an unsolved case collide when violence erupts at the courthouse.

The Shadow Tracer

by Meg Gardiner

2013

Sarah Keller is a skip tracer living quietly in Oklahoma with five-year-old Zoe until a medical emergency reveals Zoe is not her daughter. Forced onto the run, Sarah must stay ahead of police, federal agents, and her sister's killers.

Phantom Instinct

by Meg Gardiner

2014

A year after surviving a deadly nightclub shooting and fire, Harper Flynn is sure a third gunman got away and is hunting the survivors. Her only ally is wounded deputy Aiden Garrison, whose brain injury makes him a brilliant but unsettling witness.

UNSUB

by Meg Gardiner

2017

When the serial killer known as the Prophet starts leaving his signature again, young detective Caitlin Hendrix is pulled into the case that broke her father. Chasing him means facing old family damage and the danger of obsession.

Into the Black Nowhere

by Meg Gardiner

2018

Newly assigned to the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, Caitlin Hendrix hunts a predator abducting women around Austin. To catch a killer who wins trust before he strikes, she has to think like him without letting him stay in her head.

The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

2020

Caitlin Hendrix heads to Los Angeles to help stop the Midnight Man, a killer who murders parents and leaves children alive. The case grows more personal when she realizes the secret driving him echoes her own past.

Heat 2

by Meg Gardiner

2022

Co-written with Michael Mann, this crime epic returns to the world of Heat before and after the film's bank job. Vincent Hanna hunts Chris Shiherlis while earlier timelines follow Neil McCauley's crew on dangerous scores.

Recommended by:

Don Winslow

Shadowheart

by Meg Gardiner

2024

Caitlin Hendrix faces a new nightmare when imprisoned killer Efrem Judah Goode claims to have drawn women he murdered, while another killer starts leaving bodies at his old crime scenes. She has to untangle a deadly rivalry before more families lose someone.

Where should I start?

If you want the original series: China LakeMission CanyonJericho Point
If you want forensic thrillers: The Dirty Secrets ClubThe Memory CollectorThe Liar's Lullaby
If you want dark FBI suspense: UNSUBInto the Black NowhereThe Dark Corners of the Night
If you want a standalone first: Ransom RiverPhantom Instinct
If you want the big-screen crime connection: Heat 2

Author bio

Meg Gardiner was born in Oklahoma City and raised in Santa Barbara, California, in a home where books mattered. She went on to study economics at Stanford University, then earned a law degree from Stanford Law School.

Law came first. She practiced in Los Angeles, later taught legal research and writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and built the kind of career that looks settled from the outside.

Then she wrote the novel she had been carrying around for years.

In the early 1990s she moved to Britain with her family. During those years in Surrey, near London, she finally sat down and finished China Lake, a thriller about Evan Delaney, a former lawyer and freelance journalist with a sharp tongue and a habit of running toward danger. The book launched her fiction career, and when it was later published in the United States it won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.

That first series shows a lot of what Gardiner likes to do. Her books move fast, but they also keep asking what people will do when someone they love is threatened. In the Evan Delaney novels, the danger is personal and often tangled up with family, loyalty, and old damage.

She carried those interests into later books, but she changed the angle. The Dirty Secrets Club introduced Jo Beckett, a San Francisco forensic psychiatrist who performs psychological autopsies, which means she reconstructs a dead person's life to help explain how they died. Years later, UNSUB opened the door to FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix and a darker run of serial killer novels. Standalones like Phantom Instinct showed that Gardiner could step outside a series without losing her pace or nerve.

She also knows how to build a larger crime story. Gardiner coauthored Heat 2 with Michael Mann, returning to the world of the film Heat in a novel that moves both before and after the movie. Her later UNSUB books, including Into the Black Nowhere, The Dark Corners of the Night, and Shadowheart, lean hard into behavioral cat-and-mouse games without losing sight of the people caught in them.

Across her work, certain patterns keep coming back. She writes about smart women under pressure. She likes investigators who are capable but not invincible, and villains who use charm, secrecy, or ideology as weapons. California shows up again and again, from Santa Barbara and the Bay Area to Los Angeles, even when the books range farther afield.

She has also had a life outside the page that fits her brisk, competitive style. She served as president of Mystery Writers of America in 2019 and 2020, is a three-time Jeopardy! champion, and is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

These days she lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband. The path from lawyer and teacher to full-time thriller writer was not a straight line, which may be one reason her books feel so grounded when chaos hits. She knows institutions, she knows procedure, and she never seems to forget that fear lands hardest when it crashes into ordinary life.

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shaped MRB and its growth.

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