Lacey Flint Books in Order: How to read Sharon J. Bolton’s mystery series?

A female detective constable with London’s Metropolitan Police.

What is the Lacey Flint series about?

Lacey Flint is the heroine of the police procedural novels written by English author Sharon Bolton. She is a female detective constable with London’s Metropolitan Police with a suspicious past.

Lacey Flint is a practical person, who has no difficulty defying orders to achieve the results she is looking for. She’s ready to go undercover to find out the deepest and darkest secrets London has to offer, with a tendency to unintentionally become involved with serial killer cases.

How to read the Lacey Flint Books in Order?

Every book in the Lacey Flint series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.

1. Now You See Me – Late one night after interviewing a witness, Lacey Flint stumbles onto a woman brutally stabbed just moments before. Within twenty-four hours, a reporter receives an anonymous letter pointing out alarming similarities between the murder and Jack the Ripper’s first murder―a letter that calls out Lacey by name. If it’s real, and they have a killer bent on re-creating London’s bloody past, history shows they have just five days until the next attempt.
2. If Snow Hadn’t Fallen – 11 November 2012, London. Long-smouldering feelings come to a head in a burst of shocking violence. A young Muslim man is brutally murdered by a masked gang. There is just one witness to the horrific crime: DC Lacey Flint. Or at least that’s what she thinks…
3. Dead Scared – When a rash of suicides tears through Cambridge University, DI Mark Joesbury recruits DC Lacey Flint to go undercover as a student to investigate. Although each student’s death appears to be a suicide, the London police believe that someone might be preying on lonely and insecure students and either encouraging them to take their own lives or actually luring them to their deaths. As long as Lacey can play the role of a vulnerable young woman, she may be able to stop these deaths, but is it just a role for her?

4. Like This, For Ever (also called Lost) – Like everyone reading the newspapers these days, 10-year-old Barney Roberts knows the killer will strike again soon. The victim will be another boy, just like him. There will be no real reason for Barney’s friend and neighbor, Lacey Flint, on leave from her job as a London police detective, to become involved…and no chance that she can stay away. With the clock ticking, and young lives at stake, Lacey and Barney both know they can’t afford a single wrong step if they hope to make it through alive.
5. A Dark And Twisted Tide – At dawn one hot summer morning while swimming down the river, Lacey finds the body of a shrouded young woman in the water. She assumes it was chance―after all, she’s recently joined the marine policing unit, and she knows how many dead bodies are pulled out of the river every year. But further investigation leads her policing team to suspect the woman’s body was deliberately left for Lacey to find. Lacey’s no longer a homicide detective, but as she begins to notice someone keeping a strangely close eye on her, she’s inexorably drawn into the investigation.
6. Here Be Dragons – Mark Joesbury, of Scotland Yard’s Covert Operations Unit, is undercover. Embroiled in a terrorist gang’s plans for a deadly attack at the heart of the capital, he’s risking everything to stop them. But as they prepare to target London’s most iconic landmarks, it’s no longer just countless strangers he’s fighting to save. Because they’ve also got the woman he loves, DC Lacey Flint…
7. Lacey’s Wedding – Not available on Amazon or other sites for the moment. Sarah J. Bolton sent the story to people who pre-order The Split (or Dead Woman Walking before).

8. The Dark – When a baby is snatched from its pram and cast into the river Thames, off-duty police officer Lacey Flint is there to prevent disaster. But who would want to hurt a child? DCI Mark Joesbury has been expecting this. Monitoring a complex network of dark websites, Joesbury and his team have spotted a new terrorist threat from the extremist, women-hating, group known as ‘incels’ or ‘involuntary celibates.’ Joesbury’s team are trying to infiltrate the ring of power at its core, but the dark web is built for anonymity, and the incel army is vast.

If you like Lacey Flint, you may also want to see our Maeve Kerrigan reading order or our guide to Lisa Jewell’s books. Don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to discover more book series.