Below is the complete list of Tim Weaver’s David Raker Missing Persons books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of David Raker Missing Persons Books
- The Missing Family (2024)
The Missing Family is a 2024 release and appears as book #13 in the David Raker Missing Persons series. - The Lost Women (2026)
In the David Raker Missing Persons series, The Lost Women is book #14 and was published in 2026.
About David Raker Missing Persons
Tim Weaver’s David Raker series occupies a distinctive corner of British crime fiction, concentrating not on conventional homicide investigations but on people who appear to have vanished impossibly. Raker is a former newspaper journalist who now works as an independent missing-persons investigator, taking cases abandoned by the police or dismissed as insoluble. His searches lead through false identities, altered records, concealed communities, institutional corruption, and crimes designed to erase not only a victim but every reliable account of what happened.
Raker’s commitment to the missing is rooted in personal loss. The death of his wife, Derryn, leaves him isolated and unusually sensitive to the uncertainty endured by families without answers. He understands that disappearance creates a different form of grief from confirmed death: hope remains alive, but so do suspicion, guilt, and the endless reconstruction of a loved one’s final movements. This empathy makes him persistent, though it also encourages an obsessive disregard for his own safety.
Chasing the Dead establishes the series through a mother who claims to have seen her son alive despite his body having been formally identified after a fatal accident. The apparent impossibility reflects Weaver’s preferred starting point. A man boards a London Underground train but is never recorded leaving it; a family disappears from a house where dinner is still cooking; nine residents vanish from an isolated village; a couple escape unseen from a burning vehicle at the bottom of a ravine. The solutions remain grounded in human action, but the circumstances are constructed to appear almost supernatural until Raker identifies the missing information.
His journalistic background shapes how he investigates. He has no badge, arrest powers, or guaranteed institutional support. He relies on interviews, archived reporting, public records, surveillance, old photographs, and the ability to recognize when separate accounts have been built around the same concealed lie. Weaver often divides a novel among different periods or apparently unrelated characters, gradually revealing how an old crime has created a present disappearance.
Former Metropolitan Police detective Colm Healy becomes the most important recurring figure beside Raker. Their relationship develops through the unsolved murders that destroyed Healy’s career and family life. Healy is experienced, volatile, and capable of reaching information unavailable to a private investigator, but his grief and obsession also make him unpredictable. Their friendship is frequently strained by secrecy and reckless choices, yet each understands the damage driving the other. Later cases increasingly depend on the trust they have built through shared failures as much as shared successes.
Raker’s personal history also becomes part of the mystery structure. You Were Gone confronts him with a woman who looks and behaves like his dead wife, while other novels revisit his journalism career, family connections, and earlier investigations. Consequences persist: injuries, betrayals, unresolved questions, and changing relationships are not discarded when the immediate case closes.
The Shadow at the Door differs from the principal novels by bringing together four linked shorter mysteries. It belongs within the Raker continuity but is structurally a connected story collection rather than a standard full-length case. The Lost Women returns to the larger novel format, connecting a disturbing present-day identity puzzle to three women who disappeared while filming a documentary years earlier.
Most investigations can be followed independently, but the series gains considerable depth when read sequentially. Raker’s grief changes, his partnership with Healy evolves, and older events acquire consequences that extend beyond the book in which they began. Across the sequence, Weaver treats absence as an active force: a missing person leaves behind an empty space that other people fill with lies, memories, and desperate explanations until Raker uncovers the life deliberately hidden beneath them.