Tony Hill Books in Order

The Tony Hill series is built around a partnership that’s never simple: Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist with a gift for getting inside dangerous minds, and Carol Jordan, a senior detective running major investigations in the northern English city of Bradfield.

Tony isn’t a cop and he doesn’t carry a badge. He’s called in when the crimes are baffling, brutal, or strangely patterned—cases where motive matters as much as method. He looks for the human logic behind the harm: what the offender wants, what they fear, how they choose victims, and how they stage the scene. Carol has to turn those insights into solid police work—interviews, warrants, surveillance, courtroom-ready evidence—while keeping a team moving and the public (and the press) from panicking. That push and pull—psychology versus procedure—drives the series.

These books are not cozy.

McDermid uses the pair to show how investigative work really feels over time. Long hours, media pressure, and internal politics don’t just slow things down; they change the people doing the job. Tony can be brilliant and brittle in the same scene, and Carol has to make decisions that are both practical and morally messy. She’s also running a unit in a job that’s quick to judge mistakes and slow to forgive them, which adds a constant edge to every choice she makes.

The crimes tend to be high-stakes and personal, often involving predators who want control, attention, or both. The investigations pull in everything from forensic detail to the ugly side of celebrity culture, and the sense of threat doesn’t stop when a suspect is identified. Even when a case closes, there’s usually a price tag—professional, emotional, or literal.

Across the books, you’ll see the world around them shifting. New technology changes how people hide and how they’re caught. New forms of exploitation push the unit into unfamiliar territory. And the relationship between the police and the public gets messier, especially when a case becomes “a story” before it becomes a solved crime.

You can read each novel for the central mystery, but the emotional through-line is watching Tony and Carol try to stay functional while doing work designed to break people. Their bond deepens, frays, and deepens again, and the series doesn’t pretend that closure is clean.

The series was adapted for television as Wire in the Blood, which gives you a good sense of its pace: intense cases, sharp turns, and characters who carry scars from what they’ve seen.

Start with The Mermaids Singing to meet Tony and Carol at the moment their work becomes inseparable.