Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Seven Miles From Sydney | 1987 | Buy |
| A Kind of Vanishing | 2008 | Buy |
| Death of a Mermaid | 2020 | Buy |
| The Companion | 2022 | Buy |
The Detective’s Daughter Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Detective’s Daughter | 2013 | Buy |
| Ghost Girl | 2014 | Buy |
| The Detective’s Secret | 2015 | Buy |
| The Runaway | 2015 | Buy |
| The House With No Rooms | 2016 | Buy |
| The Dog Walker | 2017 | Buy |
| The Death Chamber | 2018 | Buy |
| The Playground Murders | 2019 | Buy |
| The Hollow House / The Distant Dead | 2021 | Buy |
| The Mystery of Yew Tree House | 2023 | Buy |
Lesley Thomson published her first novel in 1987 but found her audience with The Detective’s Daughter in 2013, which spent three months at number one in the UK digital charts and launched the series that has since sold over 800,000 copies. The books follow Stella Darnell, who runs a west London cleaning company, and Jack Harmon, a London Underground driver, who work as an unlikely detective pair.
The Detective’s Daughter series is set in and around west London, and Thomson uses the city’s streets, the Underground, and its outer suburbs with a strong sense of place. Stella is practical, methodical, and emotionally guarded; Jack is intuitive and strange. Their contrasting styles drive both the investigations and the character dynamics across the ten books in the series.
Thomson’s standalone novels cover different ground — A Kind of Vanishing, which won the People’s Book Prize in 2010, is a literary mystery rooted in a child’s disappearance during the summer of 1968. Death of a Mermaid (2020) and The Companion (2022) show the range of her writing outside the series.