MJ Ford Books in Order

M.J. Ford writes crime fiction built around missing people, old fears, and the pressure that comes when a case turns personal. His novels move through familiar British settings, including Oxford, Bath, and the remote Pennines, but there is usually something unsettling beneath the everyday surface.

Ford has spent much of his working life around stories. Before publishing adult thrillers, he worked as an editor and wrote children’s fiction for many years. That background shows in the clean, forward-moving setup of his crime novels: a troubling question arrives early, the stakes are clear, and the characters have to keep digging when the obvious answer does not hold.

His first adult thriller, Hold My Hand, was published in 2018.

It introduced DS Josie Masters, a police officer whose work is tied to a childhood memory she has never shaken. As a girl, Josie saw a boy being taken away at a carnival. Thirty years later, the discovery of a child’s remains brings that memory rushing back and puts her on a dangerous investigation.

Ford continued Josie’s story in Keep Her Close and Watch Over You. These books place her in Oxford and its surrounding area, where missing women, murder scenes, and people with half-hidden histories draw her into cases with a sharp emotional edge. Josie is not presented as a detective who can simply leave the job at the office. Her past, friendships, and family life all shape how she responds when the pressure rises.

The cases are dark, but the books stay focused on people rather than gore. Ford is interested in the fallout of crime: the relatives left waiting, the colleagues who know too much, and the way an old loss can change the choices someone makes years later.

Then came The Hiker, a standalone thriller that shifts away from police procedure. It follows Sarah Kline after her sister Gemma disappears in the Pennines. Sarah’s search takes her toward an isolated community, local secrets, and a landscape that feels increasingly closed in.

Place matters in Ford’s work. Oxford’s colleges and streets give the Josie Masters novels a lived-in urban backdrop, while the moors in The Hiker make isolation feel like part of the danger. He uses settings readers can picture, then lets the uncertainty build.

Ford lives with his family on the edge of the Peak District in northern England. Alongside his adult thrillers, his years as an editor and children’s writer have kept him close to the practical side of storytelling: character, momentum, and the need to give a reader a reason to turn one more page.