Stone & Randall Books in Order

Stone & Randall is one of Tim Ellis's darkest crime setups. The series works because it is not built around one tidy detective team. Instead, it turns on two people moving toward the same nightmare from very different directions. Molly Stone is a working detective trying to do the job inside the system. Cole Randall is an ex-detective who has already been blamed for a sequence of family murders, including the slaughter of his own wife and children.

In Jacob's Ladder, Randall is released from Springfield Asylum after a year of confinement and immediately starts operating outside the law. He is convinced the killer has returned, and he wants revenge before anything else can happen. That puts him on a collision course with the official investigation and with Stone, who has to work through the evidence rather than rage.

The series is grim from the first pages.

A fourth family has been butchered. A symbol has been carved into a little girl's forehead. Randall is damaged, desperate, and not especially interested in due process. Stone is more controlled, but she is hardly untouched by what the work does to her. By The Gordian Knot, the series has widened into multiple cases, including a crucified priest and a missing husband and wife, while older crimes continue to haunt both leads.

What you should expect here is a blend of procedural and psychological thriller. Ellis uses the contrast between Stone and Randall to keep the books tense. One character still has a badge. The other has already lost too much to trust institutions. That split creates moral friction as well as plot momentum.

If you like crime novels where the line between justice and obsession gets very thin, Stone & Randall is a strong fit. These books are less sprawling than Parish & Richards, but they hit hard and stay close to the damage left behind by violence.