Philip Gwynne Jones Books in Order

If you want the core Nathan Sutherland run: The Venetian Game → Vengeance in Venice → The Venetian Masquerade
If you like darker Venice family secrets: Venetian Gothic → The Venetian Legacy → The Angels of Venice
If you want the later political and pandemic-era cases: The Venetian Candidate → The Venetian Sanctuary
If you want his real-life Venice memoir: The Venice Project → To Venice with Love
If you'd like to try the newer Sicily books: The Magus of Sicily

Philip Gwynne Jones was born in Swansea in 1966 and grew up in South Wales. Before he became known for crime fiction, he spent years living and working in different parts of Europe, picking up places, habits, and details that later fed his books. Venice, though, was the city that stayed in his head.

He first came to Italy in 1994, when he worked for the European Space Agency in Frascati. It sounds glamorous. By his own telling, the job was a good deal less exciting than he had imagined. He then spent about twenty years in IT, a field he has cheerfully said he was never really suited for.

The real turning point came later. In Edinburgh, he and his wife Caroline were facing redundancy and an uncertain future. They sold everything, moved to Venice, and started again with ten pieces of luggage, no long-term place to stay, and a lot to figure out. The paperwork, money worries, language trouble, and hunt for work all became material for The Venice Project and later the expanded memoir To Venice with Love.

It also pushed him toward fiction.

In Venice he built a different working life as a writer, translator, and teacher. That matters because his books feel written by someone who knows the city as a place to live, not just a place to visit. The boats are public transport. The churches are part of the neighborhood. The food, weather, bureaucracy, and daily irritations all count.

He has said that if he walks around Venice long enough, plots usually turn up.

His best-known books are the Nathan Sutherland mysteries, which begin with The Venetian Game. Nathan is an English translator and honorary consul in Venice, a decent man with a talent for getting pulled into very bad situations. Readers tend to come for the murders and stay for the mix of dry humor, art, music, local history, and the simple pleasure of roaming through the city with someone who actually knows it. Later books like Vengeance in Venice, The Venetian Masquerade, Venetian Gothic, The Venetian Legacy, The Angels of Venice, and The Venetian Sanctuary widen that world without losing the human scale.

Jones has had solid success with these books, but the facts say enough. The Venetian Game was picked as a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and reached number two in the Times paperback fiction chart. The Venetian Legacy also made the Times top ten, and To Venice with Love was selected as a Reader's Digest Book of the Month. He opened a new line of crime fiction in 2025 with The Magus of Sicily, moving south for a mystery set around Acitrezza and the Ionian coast.

What links his work is easy to spot. He likes ordinary people who get dragged into trouble, cities with long memories, and cases where art, music, religion, and local politics rub against each other. He also leaves room for wit. Even when the stakes are serious, the books make space for awkward moments, sharp observation, and the odd very unimpressed cat.

He still lives in Venice with Caroline and their cat Mimi. Away from the desk he enjoys cooking, old horror films, classical music, opera, and, by his own admission, far too much Italian progressive rock. He is also active in the crime-writing world through the Society of Authors, the Crime Writers' Association, and Crime Cymru.