Tom Thorne Books in Order

A series of carefully planned attacks leaves Metropolitan Police officers poisoned, stabbed and terrified. As Thorne and DI Nicola Tanner dig into the victims’ chequered pasts, they uncover a vengeful campaign that forces Thorne to question the job he has devoted his life to.

Thorne seems finally settled when a string of grotesque murders leaves victims mutilated in ways that echo “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The trail leads to a young woman enthralled by escaped killer Stuart Nicklin, forcing Thorne into a brutal reckoning that threatens everyone he loves.

In the summer of 1996, two seven-year-old boys run from a playground into nearby woods and only one returns. DS Tom Thorne tackles the baffling disappearance while his personal life unravels, knowing every misstep may doom the missing child and those connected to him.

A woman apparently jumps in front of a train, but Thorne senses something wrong and discovers she was ruined by a charming con man. As he and DI Nicola Tanner track the fraudster, they collide with a damaged woman whose secret partnership turns the case lethal.

Someone is killing cats across London, and Thorne is ordered to take the case. When the mutilations connect to a string of unsolved strangulations, he and DI Nicola Tanner uncover a predator whose rehearsals on animals were only the beginning.

After her partner is murdered, DI Nicola Tanner believes she was the real target because of her work on honour-killing cases. Working off the books with Thorne, she hunts contract killers exploiting family shame while a missing young couple’s fate hangs in the balance.

On a rare countryside break, Thorne and his partner Helen Weeks are drawn into the abduction of two schoolgirls in Helen’s Warwickshire hometown. As locals and media fixate on one suspect, Thorne doubts the evidence and races to find the remaining missing girl alive.

Imprisoned psychopath Stuart Nicklin offers to lead police to the body of a boy he killed decades ago, but only if Thorne escorts him to a remote Welsh island. Trapped there with two killers and a small team, Thorne realises he has walked into a carefully engineered game.

This short collection shows Tom Thorne working through the darker side of the festive season, from a Father Christmas found dead beneath a tree to a retired boxer dragged back toward crime. Familiar rituals become the backdrop for desperate choices and unexpected acts of kindness.

Demoted back into uniform, Thorne notices a cluster of older people who appear to have taken their own lives. Convinced they were helped to die, he investigates off the books and uncovers a killer quietly preying on the lonely and vulnerable.

Police officer Helen Weeks pops into her local newsagent and walks into a hostage siege. The desperate shopkeeper demands that Thorne re-investigate his son’s supposed suicide in custody, forcing Thorne to uncover a deadly cover-up before the standoff turns fatal.

Ten years after she is jailed for arranging her husband’s murder, a woman receives a photograph suggesting he is alive and well abroad. Hired to uncover the truth, Thorne chases a charming but ruthless criminal who faked his death and will kill again to stay hidden.

When a pregnant woman is murdered in her flat, Thorne expects a grim domestic case until a bloodstained X-ray fragment in her hand links the crime to a notorious serial killer from the past. Someone is now targeting the children of that killer’s original victims.

Photographs of murder victims begin arriving on Thorne’s mobile phone before the bodies are found. As he identifies the dead and traces them back to a prison gang feud, he realises a manipulative killer he once put away is orchestrating revenge from his cell.

Sixteen-year-old Luke Mullen, son of a former senior police officer, vanishes after getting into a stranger’s car. Seconded to the Kidnap Unit, Thorne uncovers links to an old hate crime and a dangerous offender with unsettling access to people inside the force.

A run of brutal attacks on homeless men, each kicked to death and left with cash pinned to their clothes, pulls a burnt-out Thorne off desk duty. Going undercover on London’s streets, he discovers the murders may be tied to a buried military atrocity.

An unsolved case in which a schoolgirl was burned alive comes back to haunt a retired detective just as a North London gang war flares up. Thorne is drawn into both the decades-old arson and the present-day turf battle before more bodies fall.

Convicted rapists are being found bound, tortured and murdered soon after their release from prison. As public sympathy wavers, Thorne must work out whether a vigilante is cleansing the streets or someone is using old crimes to hide a far more personal revenge.

DI Tom Thorne hunts a killer who is not trying to murder his victims but to leave them alive and trapped inside their own bodies. When one young woman survives with locked-in syndrome, she becomes the only witness who cannot speak.

Two women are strangled on the same day in different parts of London, echoing an earlier pair of murders. Thorne realises he is facing not one serial killer but two working in tandem, bound together by a chilling understanding of fear.