The Liverpool Crime Books in Order

The Liverpool Crime books take Luca Veste back to familiar ground, but the feel is a little different from the Murphy and Rossi novels. These stories still care about police work and city politics, but they lean harder into damaged reputations, gangland pressure, and people trying to stay alive when every choice seems wrong.

Nobody gets an easy clean version of the truth here.

Liar Liar opens with one of Veste's sharpest setups. Mark Fletcher, once celebrated as one of Liverpool's best detectives, wakes in a hotel room beside a dead body with no memory of how he got there. He is already disgraced because of his connection to the Bonucci crime family, so the evidence against him lands hard. That gives the book two engines at once, Fletcher running for his life on the outside, and the police investigation closing in from within the force.

That inside view matters. Kirkham and Abs Hashem are not just background officers ticking through clues. They are caught between professional duty, old loyalties, and the knowledge that a friend's fall can ruin everyone around him. The series is interested in that pressure point, the place where public scandal, private guilt, and real detective work all collide.

Liverpool matters again, but in a slightly different way. The city here feels rougher, more tied to reputation, newspapers, organised crime, and the long memory of who owes what to whom. Veste knows how to use local detail without turning it into a travel guide. Streets, pubs, police offices, and gangland territory all help make the danger feel close and lived in.

The second book, Tell Tale, shows that the series is willing to shift shape without losing its core. Kirkham has built a public name as a profiler, only to be kidnapped by the man called the Dark Angel, a serial killer long dismissed as myth. That pushes the books further into psychological thriller territory, but it still fits the same world of damaged investigators, public performance, and killers who understand how stories can be used as weapons.

It is crime fiction that likes pressure.

If you pick up this series, expect fast plots, morally compromised characters, and cases that mix police procedure with serial killer menace and gangland fallout. The connecting idea is not tidy justice. It is what happens when people with badges, secrets, and bruised egos are forced to keep moving through a city that knows all their names.