Below is the complete list of Tim Weaver books in order. For each 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.
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Deadly Ambition Books
About Tim Weaver
Tim Weaver is a British crime novelist best known for creating David Raker, a former newspaper journalist who specializes in tracing people who have vanished. Through the Raker series, Weaver has developed a distinctive branch of crime fiction in which disappearance is not simply the opening stage of a murder investigation. His novels examine how a person can erase an identity, how evidence can be manipulated, and how uncertainty reshapes the families and friends left behind.
Before becoming a full-time novelist, Weaver worked as a journalist and magazine editor, writing about film, television, technology, video games, and sport. That background is reflected in Raker’s investigative methods. He does not possess police authority or command a large team. He builds cases through research, interviews, old records, overlooked connections, and a reporter’s instinct for recognizing when someone’s account has been carefully constructed.
Weaver spent years developing his first novel before Chasing the Dead was published in 2010. It introduces Raker after the death of his wife, Derryn, a loss that gives him an immediate understanding of the pain experienced by families of missing people. When a woman claims to have seen her supposedly dead son alive, Raker accepts a search that leads beyond ordinary grief into organized deception and violence. The novel established the intricate plotting, emotional stakes, and apparently impossible disappearances that would define the series.
The David Raker books subsequently became the center of Weaver’s bibliography. Cases include a teenager who vanishes without explanation, a commuter who boards a London Underground train but never appears to leave it, an entire family missing from an isolated home, and people whose identities have been deliberately concealed or replaced. Weaver often uses parallel timelines and apparently unrelated investigations, allowing their hidden connections to emerge gradually.
Raker’s personal life develops continuously beneath the individual mysteries. His grief, injuries, friendships, and increasing isolation do not disappear when a case ends. Former Metropolitan Police detective Colm Healy becomes especially important, evolving from a difficult professional contact into Raker’s closest ally. Healy’s obsession, anger, and damaged career make him both valuable and unpredictable, while his relationship with Raker gives the later novels a deeper emotional continuity.
Weaver also expands the series through recurring police officers, journalists, former colleagues, and figures connected to earlier investigations. Although each principal mystery reaches some form of resolution, consequences carry forward. Familiar characters may return under changed circumstances, and later revelations can alter the meaning of events established several books earlier. Publication order therefore provides the strongest understanding of Raker’s development and his complicated relationships.
The Shadow at the Door collects four shorter David Raker stories. These works explore cases and moments outside the main novels without functioning as a numbered full-length installment. Weaver has also written Missing Pieces, a standalone psychological thriller about a woman stranded in an isolated location with incomplete memories and no clear explanation for why her family is not searching for her.
His interest in disappearance extends beyond fiction. Weaver created and presented the Missing podcast, speaking with specialists in investigation, surveillance, forensics, psychology, data, and technology about why people disappear and how they may be found. The project closely reflects the questions driving his novels while grounding them in real investigative challenges.
With The Lost Women, published in 2026, the David Raker sequence reached fifteen novels. Across that extensive series, Weaver’s signature remains the construction of complex mysteries around absence. His missing people leave behind more than clues: they create emotional voids into which suspicion, grief, guilt, and imagined explanations begin to grow.