Joe Plantagenet Books in Order

The Joe Plantagenet series is Kate Ellis's darker, more ghost-tinged set of police mysteries. The books follow DI Joe Plantagenet in Eborby, a fictional North Yorkshire cathedral city with old streets, old buildings, and plenty of places where rumours can gather. The cases are modern, but they often come wrapped in stories of hauntings, rituals, cursed houses, and buried sins.

Joe is not a supernatural detective. He is a police officer doing the work: interviewing witnesses, building timelines, reading people, and trying to stop a killer before someone else dies. What makes the series different is the atmosphere around that work. Ellis often lets an eerie story sit beside the evidence long enough for both Joe and the reader to wonder how much can be explained away.

The city helps create that mood.

Eborby has the feel of a place that has been lived in for centuries. Abbey ruins, old closes, former asylums, historic houses, theatres, and churchyards all become part of the investigations. In Seeking The Dead, a serial killer leaves bodies in country churchyards while Joe and DCI Emily Thwaite face a case with possible occult overtones. Later books use haunted childhood legends, notorious murder houses, missing children, and theatrical scandals to keep the pressure tight.

Joe himself carries grief and damage from his past, including the loss of his wife and the death of a colleague. That gives the books a quieter emotional line beneath the crimes. He is thoughtful, patient, and often drawn to vulnerable witnesses who other people might dismiss. Emily Thwaite brings authority and her own complications, and their working relationship gives the series a strong police-team center.

These are good picks if you like crime fiction with a chill in the walls. The supernatural hints are part of the texture, but the solutions stay rooted in human motives: envy, shame, revenge, obsession, and fear of exposure.

Start with Seeking The Dead. It introduces Joe, Emily, Eborby, and the series' mix of procedural detail and ghost-story unease. From there, reading in order helps because Joe's personal history and the team's relationships carry forward.