Below is the complete list of Jack Slater books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of DS Peter Gayle Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
About Jack Slater
Jack Slater is an English crime writer best known for the DS Peter Gayle series, a long-running collection of police procedurals set primarily in Exeter and the surrounding areas of Devon. Beginning with Nowhere to Run in 2017, the series combines self-contained criminal investigations with an unusually persistent personal storyline involving Gayle’s family. Slater’s novels range across missing-person cases, murder, sexual violence, organized crime, illegal firearms, historical crimes, and cases in which apparently straightforward evidence becomes increasingly difficult to trust.
Raised in a farming family in Northamptonshire, Slater followed a varied career before establishing himself as a novelist. His working life included jobs in farming, forestry, factories, shops, and several years as a service engineer before he eventually settled into biomedical science. That broad professional background sits behind crime fiction that generally emphasizes practical investigation and ordinary working environments rather than glamorous or highly stylized policing.
Slater had written both fiction and nonfiction since childhood, but the character who would eventually define his career emerged indirectly from another project. He was developing The Venus Flaw, a conspiracy thriller involving archaeological discoveries and corruption in Malta, when a secondary police detective caught the attention of people involved in the manuscript. The suggestion that the detective might support a series of his own eventually led Slater to rethink the character and create Detective Sergeant Peter “Pete” Gayle.
Although Gayle’s fictional life is rooted in Devon—he was born in Okehampton and works in Exeter—the character’s creative origins therefore lie partly in Malta and Slater’s earlier conspiracy novel. That unusual route into the series helps explain why The Venus Flaw sits somewhat apart from the author’s main bibliography while remaining relevant to the development of his best-known protagonist.
Nowhere to Run introduces Gayle at one of the worst periods of his life. His young son has disappeared, placing enormous strain on both Gayle and his family. When another child goes missing, his professional responsibility becomes impossible to separate entirely from his private anguish. Slater chose not to resolve Gayle’s family difficulties quickly or treat them as disposable background. Their consequences continue across the series, sometimes affecting his judgment, relationships, career, and ability to concentrate on the investigations confronting his team.
That continuing personal thread distinguishes the books from police procedurals in which the detective effectively returns to the same starting position after every case. Exeter and South Devon also give the series a consistent geographical identity. Slater uses recognizable streets, parks, hospitals, courts, police stations, railway locations, prisons, and surrounding countryside, grounding increasingly serious crimes in places that otherwise belong to everyday life.
The principal series is supplemented by Nowhere to Run – The Dark Side, an unusual companion to the first Gayle novel. Rather than presenting another investigation, it retells the kidnapping case from the perspectives of the victims, perpetrators, and their families, showing events that Gayle himself could not have known while conducting the original inquiry.
Slater’s bibliography is therefore dominated by one evolving police world rather than numerous unrelated series. The criminal cases give each Peter Gayle novel its immediate momentum, but the accumulated damage to Gayle’s family and professional life gives the books their longer arc. That balance between procedural investigation and continuing consequence has allowed Slater to develop Exeter into a sustained crime-fiction setting while keeping the detective himself from becoming merely a vehicle for the next case.