Below is the complete list of Val McDermid’s Tony Hill/Carol Jordan books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Tony Hill/Carol Jordan Books
About Tony Hill/Carol Jordan
Val McDermid’s Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series is her darkest and most psychologically intense body of crime fiction, pairing a gifted clinical psychologist and criminal profiler with a determined police detective whose professional life becomes increasingly intertwined with his. Across eleven novels, beginning with The Mermaids Singing and ending with How the Dead Speak, McDermid examines serial murder, profiling, police procedure, institutional failure, trauma, addiction, and the heavy personal cost of spending years inside the minds of violent offenders.
Tony Hill approaches murder differently from the detectives around him. He is less interested initially in physical evidence than in behavior: why a killer chooses a particular victim, what fantasies shape the crime, and what seemingly insignificant actions reveal about personality. His insight can be extraordinary, but Tony is hardly emotionally uncomplicated. Socially awkward and burdened by his own psychological difficulties, he understands other people’s darkest impulses more easily than he manages ordinary intimacy.
Carol Jordan provides the investigative counterweight. Ambitious, practical, and capable of commanding difficult police teams, she initially regards profiling with understandable skepticism. Working with Tony gradually convinces her of its value, while their professional dependence develops into a relationship that is emotionally profound but resistant to conventional definition.
The Mermaids Singing establishes their partnership through a series of killings targeting men within the gay community of the fictional northern city of Bradfield. The case forces Carol to work with Tony’s emerging profiling methods while McDermid explores prejudice, sexuality, and the danger created when investigators misunderstand the community in which a killer is operating. The novel won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger.
The Wire in the Blood expands Tony’s role when he trains a group of young profilers and begins suspecting that apparently unrelated disappearances may connect to a celebrated television personality. The title later supplied the name of the ITV television adaptation starring Robson Green as Tony Hill, although the screen series developed its own plots and characters beyond direct adaptations of McDermid’s novels.
Subsequent books steadily make the investigations more personal. The Last Temptation sends Tony and Carol into a cross-European investigation involving murdered psychologists and organized crime, while The Torment of Others returns them to Bradfield and a killing pattern disturbingly similar to a supposedly solved case.
Their relationship is repeatedly damaged by the very work that connects them. Injuries, professional failures, bereavement, guilt, and encounters with recurring enemies accumulate rather than disappearing between books. The Retribution brings back one of their most dangerous adversaries, while Cross and Burn begins with Tony and Carol estranged after events that neither can easily forgive.
Later novels rebuild their connection under increasingly difficult circumstances. Splinter the Silence forms a new investigative team around suspicious deaths connected with online abuse, and Insidious Intent forces Carol into a decision with devastating legal and personal consequences.
How the Dead Speak, the eleventh novel, finds both protagonists living with the aftermath. Tony is no longer operating from his familiar professional position, while Carol has stepped away from policing, yet the discovery of multiple bodies at a former convent draws their wider circle back toward investigation.
The series’ lasting power comes from consequences. Tony and Carol do not simply solve one horrific case and arrive refreshed for the next. Every investigation changes what they can tolerate, whom they trust, and what they believe they owe each other. McDermid uses that accumulating damage to turn an exceptionally dark sequence of murder investigations into an equally sustained study of two people whose greatest strength—their ability to confront violence together—is also what repeatedly prevents them from escaping it.