Kate Rhodes Books in Order

If you want to start with London psychology thrillers: Crossbones Yard → A Killing of Angels → The Winter Foundlings.
If you enjoy river and City of London conspiracies: River of Souls (The Girl in the River) → Blood Symmetry → Fatal Harmony.
If you like atmospheric island crime series: Hell Bay → Ruin Beach → Burnt Island.
If you prefer to jump into later Ben Kitto cases: Pulpit Rock → Devil's Table → The Brutal Tide → Hangman Island.
If you are curious about her poetry: Reversal → The Alice Trap.

Kate Rhodes was born in south London and grew up in Greenwich, close to the Thames and the bustle of the city. As a child she split her time between school, the local swimming pool and the old Greenwich Theatre, where she later took her first paid job as an usherette. Those early years in a tight city community would one day become the backdrop for her crime fiction.

Before she ever thought of herself as a novelist, Rhodes tried out a string of different jobs. She worked in bars and shops, then went to university to study English, eventually completing a PhD on the American dramatist Tennessee Williams at the University of Essex. A year studying in Austin, Texas, added American landscapes and voices to the mix of places that stayed with her.

After finishing her doctorate she spent years teaching English, first in a sixth form college and later at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, including a liberal arts college in Florida. Teaching gave her a close view of how people talk, argue and change, and she has often said that time in the classroom helped her to write believable characters.

Her route into crime fiction was not a straight line.

Rhodes began as a poet, starting to write seriously while she was living in America. Her first collection, Reversal, was published in 2005 and blends memories of a difficult childhood with long road trips across the United States. A second collection, The Alice Trap, followed a few years later and was shortlisted for major poetry prizes. Fellowships and residencies, including time at Hawthornden, gave her space to focus on the work.

Alongside poetry she began to experiment with short fiction, and in 2015 she won the Ruth Rendell short story competition. That success, combined with years spent exploring how people think and behave, nudged her toward a new form. She started to imagine longer stories that could carry a proper mystery as well as the emotional detail she cared about.

Her first crime novel, Crossbones Yard, introduced London psychologist Alice Quentin, a forensic specialist whose own past is full of trauma. Set in and around the streets where Rhodes grew up, the series follows Alice as she helps the Metropolitan Police investigate cases involving City bankers, missing children and ritualistic murders. Books such as A Killing of Angels, The Winter Foundlings and River of Souls (also published as The Girl in the River) combine police procedure with an insider's view of therapy rooms, prisons and city hospitals.

Later Alice Quentin novels, including Blood Symmetry and Fatal Harmony, push her further into questions of institutional failure, revenge and the thin line between genius and obsession. Across the series Rhodes returns to themes of childhood damage, moral responsibility and how far people will go to protect the families they have left.

In 2018 she launched a second crime sequence with Hell Bay, the first of the Isles of Scilly Mysteries. These books follow DI Ben Kitto, a detective who returns to the tiny Atlantic islands where he was born after a harrowing spell with the London murder squad. Each novel centres on a different island, turning an apparently idyllic holiday setting into a locked community full of secrets, old grudges and sudden violence.

Rhodes has returned to the Scillies year after year, walking the beaches in winter storms as well as summer sun, and that familiarity shows in the detail of the Ben Kitto books. Titles such as Ruin Beach, Burnt Island, Pulpit Rock, Devil's Table, The Brutal Tide and Hangman Island mix classic whodunit puzzles with a strong sense of weather, tide and small town pressure. The series has been shortlisted for major crime awards and has been optioned for television.

Today Rhodes lives in Cambridge, where she writes full time and still finds room for poetry. She has worked as a creative writing fellow at the University of Cambridge, runs workshops in schools, colleges, libraries and prisons, and is one of the founders of the women crime writers' collective Killer Women. She shares her life there with her husband, the writer and film maker Dave Pescod, and a growing circle of stepchildren and grandchildren.

Whether she is writing poems or crime novels, she keeps returning to the same core interest, how ordinary people cope when the past catches up with them.