Trevor Negus Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: Evil in Mind → Dead and Gone → A Cold Grave
If you like missing-person tension: Taken to Die → I Am Number Four
If you want Flint and the MCIU under maximum pressure: Kill For You → One Deadly Lie → A Sweet Revenge
If you enjoy twisty later investigations: The Devil's Breath → Tied in Death → The First Cut
If you want the newest, darkest run of books: A Fatal Obsession → The First Cut → A Dark Place

Trevor Negus was born in Enfield, in north London, and spent part of his early childhood in Waltham Cross. When he was eight, his parents emigrated to Australia, and he lived for a little over two years in Rockhampton, Central Queensland. The family returned to Britain in 1971 and settled in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, a place that would later become the emotional and physical ground of much of his fiction.

In 1975 he joined the Nottinghamshire Constabulary as a police cadet. He became a regular officer in 1978 and learned the job in inner city Nottingham at a time when violent crime was especially high. Over a thirty-year career he worked as an authorised firearms officer and sniper for six years, then moved into CID. His final twelve years were spent as a detective and specialist interviewer involved in planning and carrying out interviews with murder suspects.

That background shows on almost every page he writes.

Negus has said he had been writing all his working life, even before novels, because police work meant reports, statements and case files. In his late thirties he started writing short stories for magazines for fun. A bad on-duty injury left him with a lengthy spell away from work, and writing helped fill the time. After retiring from the police in 2007, he became the director of a specialist laser clinic and training academy. Writing stayed with him, and, with what he has described as a helpful shove from his wife, he finally gave serious time to the long-held idea of writing a novel.

Before the Danny Flint books found a wider audience, he self-published six crime thrillers. He later began writing full time and built the series around the part of England he knows best. He has said he chose Nottinghamshire on purpose because he wanted the places to feel real. That decision gives the books their grounded feel. Streets, villages, canals, woods and mining communities never seem borrowed.

Readers coming to Negus now often start with Evil in Mind, a dark opening novel set during the 1984 miners' strike, where a supposed accident at a coal mine turns into a brutal hunt for two killers. Dead and Gone widens the canvas with coded murder scenes and a race to stop the next death. A Cold Grave, first published as A Different Kind of Evil, pulls Danny Flint into child exploitation and the return of an old enemy. Later books like The Devil's Breath, I Am Number Four and The First Cut show what many readers come for: detailed police procedure, a strong sense of place, and cases that keep changing shape as new facts surface.

He likes to know the end of a story before he writes the beginning.

That habit fits the books, which tend to feel carefully built rather than improvised. Negus writes early, often starting around six in the morning with a large coffee in his study, and he has spoken about doing multiple rounds of edits on every manuscript. When he is not writing, he reads widely, especially biographies and autobiographies, plays what he calls fair-weather golf, and relaxes with a book and a cold beer in the garden on a hot day. His wife and eldest daughter are his first readers, and he still writes full time from the county that shaped both his police work and his fiction.