Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Seven Miles From Sydney | 1987 | Lesley Thomson | Buy |
| 2 | A Kind of Vanishing | 2008 | Lesley Thomson | Buy |
| 3 | Death of a Mermaid | 2020 | Lesley Thomson | Buy |
| 4 | The Companion | 2022 | Lesley Thomson | Buy |
Lesley Thomson’s standalone novels span 35 years of her writing career. Her debut, Seven Miles From Sydney (1987), came long before the Detective’s Daughter series, and her recent standalones — Death of a Mermaid (2020) and The Companion (2022) — show how her style has developed alongside the series work.
The strongest entry is A Kind of Vanishing (2008), which won the People’s Book Prize in 2010. Set against the backdrop of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, it follows two nine-year-old girls playing hide-and-seek in an abandoned village, and the haunting consequences of what happens when one of them disappears. It is more literary in texture than the Detective’s Daughter books, concerned with memory and guilt as much as with mystery.
Readers who have finished the series and want more from Thomson will find the standalones worth seeking out. Death of a Mermaid, set along the English coast, and The Companion are both psychological crime novels that fit comfortably alongside contemporary British fiction in the genre.