Steve Cavanagh Books in Order

If you want the full courtroom arc: The Defence → The Plea → The Liar → Thirteen.
If you’d like to start with his most talked‑about cases: Thirteen → Fifty-Fifty → The Devil's Advocate.
If you prefer twisty standalones without series baggage: Twisted → Kill for Me, Kill for You.
If you want a quick taster before a full novel: The Cross → The Defence.

Steve Cavanagh grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a working‑class family where stories and arguments competed with the noise of the city. Long before he ever stepped into a courtroom, he was the kid who loved crime novels and American thrillers from the library.

At eighteen he left home for Dublin and, as he likes to tell it, ended up studying law almost by accident. Before he ever put on a suit he washed dishes, worked doors as a bouncer, did security shifts and answered phones in call centres, watching how people behave when money, pride or safety are on the line.

Law, though, turned out to be a good fit. After qualifying as a solicitor he returned to Belfast and spent years as an investigator and then as a lawyer, specialising in civil rights and discrimination cases. In 2010 he represented a factory worker who had endured serious racial abuse at work and won what was then the largest race‑discrimination award in Northern Ireland, a result that made headlines and shaped his sense of what the legal system can and can’t fix.

Even while he was building a career, Cavanagh kept writing in the background. He tried his hand at screenplays when he was younger, then set fiction aside for more than a decade as work and family life took over. A sudden bereavement in 2011 pushed him back toward the thing he’d always wanted to do, and he began drafting at the kitchen table after his family went to bed, teaching himself how to build a thriller scene by scene.

Out of those late nights came Eddie Flynn, a former con artist turned New York defense attorney who treats every trial like a long game of misdirection. The first Flynn novel, The Defence, introduced readers to a lawyer who straps on a bomb for the Russian mob, outsmarts the FBI and still finds time to worry about his ten‑year‑old daughter. The Plea dives into corporate fraud and blackmail, while The Liar and Thirteen push Eddie into kidnapping plots and a murder trial where a serial killer sits on the jury.

Readers keep coming back to Eddie because he’s sharp but never slick. He drinks too much, makes bad calls and often feels outgunned, yet he refuses to take on a client he thinks is guilty. Cavanagh’s own years in court show through in the way he writes cross‑examination, jury selection and back‑room deals; the books move fast, but they’re built on a real understanding of how trials grind people down.

Alongside the Eddie Flynn series, Cavanagh writes standalones that let him play with different kinds of suspense. Twisted is a dark, meta‑thriller about a famously anonymous crime writer whose identity may not be what anyone expects, while Kill for Me, Kill for You follows ordinary New Yorkers drawn into a pact for revenge that quickly gets out of control.

That mix of pace, puzzle and human detail has brought him a wide audience. The Liar won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2018 and Thirteen took the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2019, and his novels now sell in many countries and more than twenty languages.

These days Cavanagh lives back in Northern Ireland with his wife and children and writes full time. He has co‑hosted a crime‑writing podcast, appears regularly at festivals and still sounds, in interviews, like a lawyer who can’t quite believe he gets to make things up for a living. On the page, that mix of graft, humour and hard‑earned courtroom experience is what keeps his stories humming.