Steven Dunne Books in Order

If you want the main series from the beginning: The Reaper → The Disciple → Deity
If you want the full Reaper arc: The Reaper → The Disciple → The Resurrection
If you want later Brook at his sharpest: The Unquiet Grave → A Killing Moon → Death Do Us Part
If you want a standalone thriller: Blood Summer
If you want supernatural fantasy instead: Seed of Doubt → Root Cause

Steven Dunne was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and grew up there before heading south to study at Kent University. After graduating in 1979, he completed a postgraduate teaching qualification at St Mary's College in Twickenham. Those early moves, from Yorkshire to London and later to Derby, gave him the feel for place that runs through much of his fiction.

Before novels took over, he had a long apprenticeship in ordinary jobs and odd corners of writing.

He worked in London as a public relations consultant, a supply teacher, and a freelance journalist. He also wrote occasional pieces for national newspapers while trying out other creative work on the side. For a while he even did stand-up comedy. He co-wrote a Channel 4 comedy pilot called Not Enough Poodles, which made it close but was never commissioned, and in 1989 he wrote the book for an award-winning stage version of Hansel and Gretel.

In 1988 he began teaching English in Croydon, and in 1996 he moved to Derby. That move mattered. Derby became the backdrop for his best-known crime novels, and it was there that he started thinking seriously about writing one of his own. He has said that reading Thomas Harris, especially The Silence of the Lambs, pushed him toward thrillers and made him want stories that really delivered on tension.

He did not get an easy break.

After spending two years trying to interest publishers in his manuscript, Dunne decided to publish The Reaper himself in 2007. It found readers in the East Midlands and sold strongly enough to change his path. HarperCollins later bought the rights and released the book internationally in 2009. That was followed by The Disciple in 2010, and then a deal for Deity, which helped establish him as a writer of dark, layered police thrillers.

Most readers start with DI Damen Brook, and it is easy to see why. Brook is sharp, difficult, emotionally bruised, and never quite at peace, a former Met detective trying to outrun damage that will not stay in the past. Across The Reaper, The Disciple, Deity, The Unquiet Grave, A Killing Moon, and Death Do Us Part, Dunne builds cases that mix serial murder, missing persons, old secrets, and the slow grind of police work. Readers tend to come for the puzzles and stay for the pressure those cases put on Brook and everyone around him.

There is also a strong sense of setting in his work. Derby is not just a label on the map in these books. Its streets, estates, rivers, suburbs, and edges with the Peak District help shape the mood. Even when Dunne moves away from Brook, as he does in the standalone Blood Summer, he keeps the same interest in how place changes danger, and how ordinary lives can be pulled into something much darker than they expected.

What stands out across his fiction is the mix of momentum and damage. His books are full of people carrying guilt, fear, obsession, or the weight of old mistakes. He likes investigations that branch, double back, and force characters to face what they would rather leave buried. He came to fiction the long way round, and that practical, persistent route into writing still feels close to the work.