Nathan Dylan Goodwin Books in Order
Explore Nathan Dylan Goodwin books in order, with series lists, short summaries, background notes, and clear reading tips on where to start.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
21 books
Hastings at War
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2005
This local history reconstructs life in Hastings during the Second World War, blending wartime records with memories from residents. It shows a seaside town facing bombing, blackout, rationing, evacuation, and the constant fear of invasion.
Hastings & St Leonards Through Time
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2010
A pictorial local history tracing how Hastings and St Leonards changed across the twentieth century. Old images and modern context show the resort’s Victorian confidence, wartime decline, and continuing reinvention.
Hastings
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2011
Focused on wartime memories and photographs, this history gathers the experiences of people who lived through Hastings on the Home Front. Personal stories and more than 140 images bring the town’s danger and endurance into view.
Around Battle Through Time
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2012
This photographic history follows Battle, East Sussex, through a century of change. Paired images and local detail capture the streets, landmarks, and everyday places that shaped the town around the famous abbey and battlefield.
Hiding the Past
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2013
Peter Coldrick hires Morton Farrier because his own birth records seem to vanish into wartime silence. When Coldrick dies, Morton keeps digging, even as powerful people make it clear the past should stay buried.
The Lost Ancestor
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2014
A terminally ill client asks Morton to trace Mary Mercer, a housemaid who disappeared from an Edwardian country house in 1911. The deeper Morton looks, the more the old household closes ranks.
The Orange Lilies
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2014
At Christmastime, Morton turns from clients’ secrets to his own family history. His research reaches back to the Western Front in 1914, where the famous truce may have hidden a darker truth.
The America Ground
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2015
Morton finally hopes to investigate his own father, but a case tied to a murdered woman in a two-hundred-year-old painting pulls him away. Hastings history and family secrets collide.
The Spyglass File
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2016
With his career slowing, Morton takes a case for a woman abandoned during the Battle of Britain. The search uncovers a hidden document, dangerous wartime links, and people still willing to protect old secrets.
The Missing Man
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2017
Morton travels to Cape Cod to learn what happened to his father, who vanished after a fatal Christmas Eve fire in 1976. The case is personal, painful, and tied to family lies.
The Suffragette's Secret
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2017
Exhausted by a new addition at home, Morton still agrees to investigate Grace Emmerson, a militant suffragette and his wife’s great-grandmother. Her hidden past leads him into courage, risk, and family memory.
Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2018
Sussex, 1919. Harriet Agnes McDougall cannot rest until she understands how her son Malcolm died in the Belgian trenches, and her search leads her into a Europe still scarred by war.
The Asylum
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2018
In this short prequel, Morton expects a simple family-history job. An unexpected marriage record leads instead to an asylum death and an eighty-year-old secret that needs careful untangling.
The Wicked Trade
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2018
A mysterious letter pulls Morton into the Georgian smuggling world of the Kent and Sussex border. As he investigates the Aldington Gang and a brutal killing, his client’s motives start to feel unsafe.
The Sterling Affair
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2020
A stranger asks Morton to identify a man who lived under the name of her long-dead brother. The trail reaches into 1950s state secrets, while Morton faces a startling DNA match of his own.
The Chester Creek Murders
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2021
Detective Clayton Tyler reopens a 1980s serial murder case in Delaware County and asks Venator for help. Madison Scott-Barnhart’s team must use genetic genealogy when every old lead has gone cold.
The Foundlings
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2021
Morton has six days to identify three women abandoned as newborns in the 1970s, using only their DNA as a clue. One of them is his half-aunt, making the case uncomfortably close.
The Sawtooth Slayer
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2022
During the 2020 pandemic, a killer is abducting women in Twin Falls, Idaho. Detective Maria Gonzalez turns to Venator, asking Madison’s team to identify him from DNA before he strikes again.
The Deserter's Tale
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2023
In Salt Lake City for a genealogy conference, Morton meets former girlfriend Madison Scott-Barnhart after twenty-six years. He also investigates his wife’s great-grandfather, who deserted his Sussex family after the First World War.
The Hollywood Strangler
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2024
Decades after six small-time actors were murdered and posed like scenes from their films, the LAPD asks Venator for help. Madison must test whether old DNA can finally name the killer.
The Hop-Picker Murders
by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
2025
When Molly Moon finds her aunt’s 1920 journal, it claims four missing hop-pickers were murdered, including Molly’s uncle. Morton takes the case and soon faces threats aimed at his career.
Where should I start?
For Morton Farrier from the beginning: The Asylum → Hiding the Past → The Lost Ancestor → The Orange Lilies.
For the main Forensic Genealogist arc: Hiding the Past → The America Ground → The Spyglass File → The Missing Man.
For modern DNA cold cases: The Chester Creek Murders → The Sawtooth Slayer → The Hollywood Strangler.
For post-WWI historical mystery: Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star.
For local history first: Hastings at War → Hastings → Hastings & St Leonards Through Time.
Author bio
Nathan Dylan Goodwin was born and raised in Hastings, East Sussex, a town with a long memory and plenty of old stories underfoot. He went to school there, listened to family stories, and grew up around the kind of local history that later found its way into both his nonfiction and his crime novels.
Genealogy grabbed him early.
At about twelve, Goodwin began exploring the Dengate side of his family after spending time with the photographs, newspaper cuttings, orders of service, and other keepsakes saved by his maternal grandmother, Eveline Dengate. Many of those relatives had lived close to Hastings for generations, so family history was not an abstract chart to him. It was tied to streets, churches, cemeteries, and places he already knew.
Before fiction, he wrote history. His first book, Hastings at War, was published in May 2005, and he followed it with more local-history books about Hastings and the nearby area. During those years he also trained as a teacher and worked in primary schools, which is a very practical way to learn how to hold a room’s attention.
The crime fiction started with a university project. Goodwin earned a degree in Radio, Film and Television Studies, then a master’s degree in Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University. For his final MA assessment, he wrote the opening chapters of a story about a forensic genealogist. After editing and redrafting, that idea became Hiding the Past.
Morton Farrier changed the shape of his career.
The Forensic Genealogist books follow Morton as he uses family trees, archives, old records, and later DNA clues to solve mysteries rooted in the past. The Lost Ancestor reaches into an Edwardian country house. The America Ground digs into the history of Hastings. The Spyglass File moves through the shadow of the Battle of Britain. Readers tend to come for the puzzle, then stay for the way present-day lives are tangled up with people who died long ago.
Goodwin has also widened the world beyond Morton. Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star opens the Mrs. McDougall Investigates series in the aftermath of the First World War, while The Chester Creek Murders launches the Venator Cold Case books, a United States-based series built around investigative genetic genealogy and Madison Scott-Barnhart.
His books return often to missing people, hidden parentage, wartime secrets, old crimes, and the stubborn pull of family. The tone is mystery first, but the engine is research: census pages, certificates, maps, newspaper reports, DNA matches, and the small gaps where a story can hide.
Goodwin lives in a small village in Kent with his family. When he is not writing, he still researches his own family tree, and he makes room for running, gardening, walking, photography, reading, and the everyday busyness of home life.
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