Lynda La Plante Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Lynda La Plante books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.

Anna Travis Series

1. Above Suspicion (2004)
2. The Red Dahlia (2006)
3. Clean Cut (2007)
4. Deadly Intent (2008)
5. Silent Scream (2009)
6. Blind Fury (2010)
7. Blood Line (2011)
8. Backlash (2012)
9. Wrongful Death (2013)

CSI Jessica Russell Series

1. The Scene of the Crime (2025)

DC Jack Warr Series

1. Buried (2020)
2. Judas Horse (2021)
3. Vanished (2022)
4. Pure Evil (2023)
5. Crucified (2025)

Dolly Rawlins Series

1. Widows (1985)
2. Widows Revenge (1994)
3. She’s Out (1995)

Jane Tennison Series

1. Tennison (2015)
2. Hidden Killers (2017)
3. Good Friday (2017)
4. Murder Mile (2018)
5. The Dirty Dozen (2019)
6. Blunt Force (2020)
7. Unholy Murder (2021)
8. Dark Rooms (2023)
9. A Taste of Blood (2023)
10. Whole Life Sentence (2024)

Legacy Series

1. The Legacy (1987)
2. The Talisman (1988)

Lorraine Page Series

1. Cold Shoulder (1994)
2. Cold Blood (1997)
3. Cold Heart (1998)

Prime Suspect Series

1. Prime Suspect (1991)
2. A Face in the Crowd (1992)
3. Silent Victims (1993)

Trial and Retribution Series

1. Trial and Retribution (1997)
2. Trial and Retribution II / Alibi (1998)
3. Trial and Retribution III / Accused (1999)
4. Trial and Retribution IV / Appeal (2000)
5. Trial and Retribution V (2002)
6. Trial and Retribution VI (2002)

Standalone Novels Series

1. Bella Mafia (1990)
2. Civvies (1992)
3. Framed (1992)
4. Entwined (1992)
5. Seekers (1993)
6. Lifeboat (1994)
7. The Governor (1995)
8. Sleeping Cruelty (2001)
9. Royal Flush / Royal Heist (2002)
10. Twisted (2014)

Short Stories/Novellas Series

1. The Little One (2012)
2. The Escape (2012)

Non-Fiction Series

1. Getting Away With Murder (2025)

About Lynda La Plante Series

Lynda La Plante built one of the most formidable careers in modern British crime fiction by succeeding in two closely connected fields at once: television crime drama and crime novels. Her official site and publisher biographies present that dual identity clearly. She trained at RADA, worked as an actress with major stage companies before turning to writing, and then made her major breakthrough not first as a novelist but as the creator of Widows and, most famously, Prime Suspect.

That television background matters because it explains a great deal about the novels. La Plante writes crime with a dramatist’s instinct for pressure, confrontation, institutions, and the slow exposure of hypocrisy. Her books are not built around cosy puzzle mechanics. They are police-and-crime narratives driven by hierarchy, politics, forensic detail, and the private cost of working inside brutal systems. Even when she is writing page-turning commercial fiction, the emotional force often comes from professional pressure rather than from decorative suspense.

Her bibliography is best understood in major strands. The first, and still the defining one, is Jane Tennison. La Plante’s official site identifies Prime Suspect and Tennison as central series lines, and her broader career narrative explicitly treats Tennison as the character who changed everything. Jane Tennison is not simply one more detective in a crowded field. She is La Plante’s great vehicle for writing about misogyny inside policing, institutional resistance, female authority, and the personal toll of obsession. That is why the Tennison books and the wider Prime Suspect world remain so central to understanding her shelf.

The second major line is Anna Travis. La Plante’s official biography page lists the Anna Travis sequence beginning in the early 2000s with Above Suspicion and continuing through a substantial run of novels. Publisher material for Above Suspicion also frames Anna as La Plante’s most memorable female detective since Jane Tennison, which is revealing in itself. Anna is not a replacement for Tennison, but she does show La Plante extending the same interest in female investigators, power structures, and violent crime into a newer generation of police fiction.

Beyond those two best-known strands, her official books page shows how broad the shelf really is: Widows, Trial and Retribution, Lorraine Page, The Governor, Jack Warr, Jessica Russell, and a number of standalone novels. That wider spread matters because La Plante is not only the author of one iconic policewoman. She has repeatedly built crime worlds around different professional angles and tonal registers, from gritty policing to courtroom and criminal-underworld territory.

Her career has also been recognized at a very high level. Official and reference sources note her CBE, her place in the Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame, and, more recently, the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Those honors fit the scale of her influence. La Plante did not simply participate in British crime writing; she helped reshape its female-led procedural tradition for television and fiction alike.

The best way to understand Lynda La Plante’s bibliography, then, is as the work of a writer who brought institutional realism, dramatic authority, and hard-edged female-centered crime storytelling into the mainstream with unusual force. Whether through Jane Tennison, Anna Travis, or her other crime lines, she writes the kind of fiction that treats policing and criminal investigation not as tidy intellectual games, but as arenas of power, ambition, compromise, and endurance. That seriousness is what gives her shelf its identity, and why her books still feel tougher and more substantial than the average crime franchise.