Will Shindler Books in Order

If you want the DI Alex Finn series from the beginning: The Burning Men → The Killing Choice → The Hunting Ground
If you want to finish the Alex Finn run after that: The Blood Line → The Cold Case
If you want a standalone horror novel: The Bone Queen
If you want his Doctor Who audio work: The Twilight Kingdom → Scaredy Cat

Will Shindler is a London-based novelist and BBC broadcast journalist whose fiction grew out of decades spent telling fast-moving stories for radio and television. He comes from South London, and that local knowledge shows up clearly in the streets, institutions, and everyday pressures of his crime novels. After many years working across news and drama, he turned to novels in 2020.

Most of his working life has been tied to the BBC. He has spent more than twenty-five years in broadcast journalism, and he still reads news bulletins for BBC Radio London while continuing to write fiction. Earlier in his career he also worked as a presenter for ITV West, a reporter for BBC Radio Five Live, and one of the stadium presenters at the 2012 London Olympics.

He also spent close to a decade in television drama, working with the BBC Drama Series Department and Talkback Thames as a writer and script editor. Credits linked with that part of his career include The Bill, Doctors, and Born and Bred. That background feeds naturally into his novels, which tend to move with the clear structure of screen drama while staying close to the practical details of working life.

Before the crime novels, he also wrote Doctor Who audio dramas.

His Big Finish stories The Twilight Kingdom and Scaredy Cat sit in the Eighth Doctor run and already show some of the things he keeps coming back to as a novelist: uneasy choices, emotional fallout, and danger that feels personal as well as physical. Even when the setting turns strange or futuristic, he is interested in consequences and in what fear does to a group.

Then came The Burning Men, the book that introduced DI Alex Finn and Mattie Paulsen. Set in South London, it opens with a fire, a hidden act of betrayal, and a mystery that refuses to cool down. Readers who click with Shindler's police fiction often respond to the grounded setting, the procedural detail, and the way personal strain keeps pressing against the investigation.

He kept building from there with The Killing Choice, The Hunting Ground, The Blood Line, and The Cold Case. Across those books, the crimes are sharp and high-pressure, but the real pull is often the human cost around them: families under stress, old guilt resurfacing, and investigators carrying more history than they would like. The plots are dark, yet the people inside them still feel recognisable.

He does not stay in one lane.

With The Bone Queen, Shindler moved into horror, following a mother's search for her missing daughter into an island community shaped by rumor and local legend. It is a shift in genre, but not a total break. The same interests are still there, a strong sense of place, ordinary people facing extraordinary pressure, and the nagging feeling that the past is never finished with the present.

He lives in London, still close to the places and rhythms that feed so much of his work. That mix of newsroom discipline, screenwriting experience, and local knowledge gives his fiction a practical, forward-driving feel. The books move quickly, but they also leave room for damaged people, messy motives, and the kind of choices nobody gets through cleanly.