Below is the complete list of Steve Cavanagh books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Eddie Flynn Books
- Two Kinds of Stranger (2025)
In the Eddie Flynn series, Two Kinds of Stranger is book #9 and was published in 2025.
Publication Order of Eddie Flynn Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Group Fifteen Files Books
Publication Order of Akashic Noir Books
About Steve Cavanagh
Steve Cavanagh is a Northern Irish crime writer and former lawyer best known for the Eddie Flynn legal thrillers. Born in Belfast in 1976 and raised in a working-class family, he studied law in Dublin and Cardiff before completing his professional training at Queen’s University Belfast. He later practised criminal litigation and civil rights law, experience that gave him direct knowledge of courtroom strategy, witness examination, negotiation, and the institutional pressures surrounding legal cases.
The idea for Eddie Flynn emerged while Cavanagh was cross-examining a witness. He recognized that an effective trial lawyer and a successful confidence trickster rely upon many of the same skills: persuasion, distraction, misdirection, performance, and an ability to anticipate how another person will react. That connection became the foundation of Flynn, a former con artist who abandons crime, becomes a New York defence attorney, and discovers that his old abilities can be exceptionally useful in court.
Cavanagh introduced the character in The Defence, published in 2015 and released in the United States as The Defense. The novel immediately places Flynn under extraordinary pressure, forcing him to defend a Russian mobster while secretly carrying a bomb into a Manhattan courthouse. Later installments broaden the series through murder trials, kidnappings, serial killers, corrupt prosecutors, organized crime, and conspiracies reaching into the justice system itself. Although each book presents a distinct case, Flynn’s professional partnerships, family relationships, moral injuries, and growing reputation develop throughout the sequence.
The series received wider international attention with Thirteen, built around the striking premise that the killer is not on trial but serving on the jury. The novel won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and became one of Cavanagh’s defining works. The Liar received the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, while Fifty-Fifty was selected for major British book clubs and further established his reputation for trials in which several apparently convincing versions of the truth compete for belief.
Flynn is surrounded by a recurring legal and investigative circle that prevents the novels from becoming isolated courtroom puzzles. Judge Harry Ford, attorney Kate Brooks, former police officer Harper, investigator Bloch, and other allies bring different skills and loyalties to the cases. Flynn remains the central attraction: quick-thinking, emotionally bruised, and prepared to manipulate a dishonest system without entirely surrendering his principles. Cavanagh uses his legal background to give the trials structure and credibility, but his emphasis is firmly on suspense, reversals, and the psychological contest between advocates, defendants, witnesses, jurors, and killers.
The main sequence continued through novels including Witness 8, Two Kinds of Stranger, and One of Us Is Guilty. The shorter work The Cross serves as an earlier Eddie Flynn adventure, but the full-length novels provide the principal development of the character and his team.
Cavanagh has also written independent psychological thrillers. Twisted examines authorship, manipulation, and the dangerous uncertainty surrounding a famously secretive novelist. Kill for Me, Kill for You follows two women drawn toward an arrangement shaped by grief, revenge, and mutual suspicion. These stand-alones share the Eddie Flynn books’ fascination with deception while moving beyond the continuing legal cast.
Cavanagh’s fiction is marked by economical chapters, strong opening hooks, controlled disclosure, and twists that emerge from character as much as plotting. His bibliography divides naturally between the continuing Eddie Flynn series and his stand-alone thrillers, but both reveal the same central interest: how skilled liars exploit the assumptions of people who believe they can recognize the truth.