Steve Robinson Books in Order

Steve Robinson was born in coastal Kent, England, and has lived near London. He started writing young, with an article published in a computer adventure magazine when he was sixteen. The habit stuck.

For years, Robinson worked in software and telecommunications. When he was made redundant in 2005, writing full time was not his carefully mapped-out next step. But he had time, an idea, and a growing interest in family history, so he began working seriously on a novel.

That novel became In the Blood, the first Jefferson Tayte mystery. Its roots were partly personal. Robinson's maternal grandfather was an American serviceman stationed in England during the Second World War who later returned to the United States, leaving Robinson's grandmother and children behind. Robinson eventually traced him through military records and found he had been born in Arkansas, but the unanswered parts of that story stayed with him.

Family history gave him a way into crime fiction.

In Robinson's books, old records, missing people, private letters, and inherited secrets are never just background details. They are clues. His American genealogist Jefferson Tayte follows them across Britain and beyond, often finding that a search for an ancestor has put someone in present-day danger.

The Jefferson Tayte series began with In the Blood in 2011 and continued with books including To the Grave, The Last Queen of England, The Lost Empress, Kindred, and Letters from the Dead. The stories commonly move between a modern investigation and an earlier period, from wartime England to eighteenth-century London, Victorian streets, and colonial India. Readers who enjoy a historical puzzle alongside a fast-moving mystery will find plenty to dig into.

Robinson conceived the first Tayte story after a trip to Cornwall, where a small historical detail sparked a larger question: what if a man had been murdered after writing a bitter local verse? He spent several years writing the first three novels while looking for a publisher, then released them independently in 2012. Their early success led to a publishing deal, and the series grew to eight books, including the shorter, stand-alone-friendly The Girl in the Painting.

He has also written historical suspense outside the Tayte books. The Penmaker's Wife follows a mother trying to remake her life in Victorian England, while The Secret Wife is a darker Gothic-leaning story set in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Both keep Robinson's interest in the pressure that secrets put on ordinary people.

His fiction is built for readers who like asking one more question. A family tree may look tidy at first, but in a Steve Robinson novel, it rarely stays that way.