Below is the complete list of Ann Cleeves’ Willow Reeves and Jimmy Perez books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Willow Reeves & Jimmy Perez Books in Publication Order
About Willow Reeves and Jimmy Perez
Ann Cleeves’s Willow Reeves and Jimmy Perez books are best understood as a new, very short branch growing out of the Shetland novels rather than a long-established separate series. The key title here is The Killing Stones, which official publisher and author pages identify as the return of Jimmy Perez after the end of the original Shetland run. Cleeves’s own site makes clear that Perez has left Shetland behind and is now living in Orkney with his partner Willow and their son, which gives this line a new domestic and geographic center even while it remains tied to the emotional world readers already know.
That change in setting is what gives the series its real identity. Shetland was always as much about atmosphere and community pressure as about detection, and this newer line keeps that strength while shifting the landscape from Shetland to Orkney. The Killing Stones is built around a murder involving an ancient stone and a storm-lashed island environment, so the series begins with the same interest in place, history, and local secrecy that has long defined Cleeves’s fiction. But because Perez is no longer simply the Shetland detective he once was, the tone is altered as well. He returns not as a man fully rooted in the old life, but as someone carrying his past into a different place and a different stage of family life.
Willow Reeves matters here because her presence changes the structure of the story, even when Perez remains the more immediately familiar name. In the older Shetland books, Jimmy’s emotional life often sat beneath the investigation as a source of pressure or sorrow. In this newer line, Willow is not background. She is part of the reason the books feel like a continuation with a new shape rather than a simple nostalgic return. The phrase “Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves” signals that clearly. This is not just another Shetland case revived years later. It is a story world now defined by a partnership, a family unit, and the tension between domestic life and violent disruption.
Because the line is still so small, the most useful context is not a long explanation of sequence but an understanding of tone. Readers should not expect a large multi-book mythology to be fully built out yet. At present, the series begins with The Killing Stones, which author, publisher, Macmillan series, and bibliographic listings all position as book one. That means the series is still establishing itself. Its interest lies in watching Cleeves reopen Perez’s world with a fresh emotional angle and a new landscape, while keeping the quiet intelligence, patience, and moral seriousness that made him such a strong character in the first place.
Beneath an already completed list, the best way to understand the Willow Reeves and Jimmy Perez books is as Ann Cleeves’s next chapter for one of her most beloved detectives: not a reset, and not merely a Shetland afterthought, but a more mature continuation shaped by partnership, parenthood, and a new island world. What makes the line promising is that it keeps what was strongest about the earlier books—landscape, hidden history, and emotional restraint—while opening space for Perez to become something slightly different from the man readers first met in Shetland.