Susan Wilkins Books in Order

If you want gritty gangland crime: The Informant → The Mourner → The Killer
If you want Jo Boden from the beginning: It Should Have Been Me → She's Gone → Her Perfect Husband
If you want a police series set in Devon: Buried Deep → Close to the Bone
If you want a conspiracy-driven standalone: A Killer's Heart

Susan Wilkins was born in Southend-on-Sea and grew up in Essex. That stretch of England, with its coast, commuter edges, and rough corners, later fed straight into her fiction. Essex is not just a backdrop in her books. It feels lived in, argued with, and understood from the inside.

Before she became a novelist, Wilkins studied Law, spent time as a journalist, and then built a long career in television drama. Over about twenty-five years she wrote for a wide range of British shows, including Casualty, Holby City, Heartbeat, Coronation Street, EastEnders, Footballers' Wives, Dangerfield, and Down to Earth. She also created the BBC detective drama South of the Border.

Television was her apprenticeship.

You can feel that background in the way her novels are put together. The scenes land cleanly, the pressure keeps building, and the characters' wants keep colliding. She has said that her fiction keeps returning to a basic question: how do ordinary people end up on the wrong side of the law? That interest in motive, pressure, and bad choices runs through everything she writes.

Her first novel, The Informant, appeared in 2014 and introduced Kaz Phelps, a young woman released from prison who wants out of her Essex gangster family for good. The Mourner and The Killer followed, turning Kaz's story into a gritty trilogy about loyalty, survival, and the long reach of violence. Readers who like crime with a strong psychological pull often start there, because Kaz is tough, damaged, and never allowed an easy way out.

But Wilkins has never stayed in one lane for long.

In It Should Have Been Me, she shifts toward a more intimate family wound, with Jo Boden forced to re-examine the murder of her sister. In Buried Deep and Close to the Bone, she moves into a police series set in Devon and follows Megan Thomas, a detective trying to rebuild herself after years undercover. A Killer's Heart opens things out again, mixing medical fear, conspiracy, and political danger. The plots change shape, but her focus stays steady: people under strain, secrets that refuse to stay buried, and women trying to think clearly in situations designed to throw them off balance.

Again and again, Wilkins writes about women under pressure. Some are detectives. Some are suspects. Some are simply trying to hold a life together while the truth comes for them. Family loyalty, coercive relationships, corruption, class, and the uneasy overlap between crime and respectability show up often in her work. So do settings that matter, Essex streets, London power circles, Cambridge privilege, and the sea-cut landscapes of Devon.

Wilkins has moved around within the UK and abroad, but she is now settled on the Devon coast. She has said she walks by the sea every day and drinks too much coffee. It sounds like a good working life for someone who had one full writing career in television and then started another, just as sharply, in crime fiction.