Meg Gardiner Books in Order - Complete List

Meg Gardiner is the New York Times bestselling author of at least sixteen thrillers, including the popular forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett series, the freelance journalist Evan Delaney novels, and the FBI Agent Caitlin Hendrix / UNSUB detective series.

Here are the Meg Gardiner books in order of reading and publication order for her series and standalone novels. The list will be updated with any new novels published in the future.

Latest Meg Gardiner Books

The Dark Corners of the Night — **Shadowheart** (UNSUB #4), 2024

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Evan Delaney Books in Publication Order

Jo Beckett Books in Publication Order

Caitlin Hendrix/UNSUB Books in Publication Order

Standalone Novels in Order of Publication

Ransom River, 2012
The Shadow Tracer, 2013
Phantom Instinct, 2014
Heat 2, 2022 (with Michael Mann) (movie tie-in novel)

Anthologies and Short Story Collections

Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, 2016 (Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, book 1, edited by Laurie R King and Leslie S Klinger)
Deadly Anniversaries: A Collection of Stories from Crime Fiction’s Top Authors, 2020 (Mystery Writers of America Presents)
Brutal & Strange: Stories Inspired by the Songs of Elvis Costello, 2023 (edited by Jim Fusilli)

China Lake

Evan Delaney is shocked to learn that her ex-sister-in-law, Tabitha, has joined the Remnant, a religion with a dangerous and fanatical following. What is more alarming is that the unstable young mother plans to regain custody of her son and disappear with him into the fold of the church. She has the Remnant on her side, and they’ll do anything it takes – including murder – to get what they want. But it’s another member of the Remnant who’s killed, and when Evan’s brother becomes a suspect, Evan is dragged even deeper into the nightmare.

Mission Canyon

Evan Delaney has come to terms with the hit-and-run crash that left her boyfriend, Jesse Blackburn, in a wheelchair and killed his best friend. But when she hears that the driver, Franklin Brand, is back in Santa Barbara, she is determined to help Jesse bring him to book for his crime.

Brand was a golden boy at Mako Technologies, a heavyweight cyber-security firm. That’s where Evan starts looking, and as she digs deeper, she finds evidence of theft and extortion. Then witnesses to the hit-and-run start dying. It seems that powerful interests are determined to stop Jesse and Evan – once and for all.

Jericho Point

When the body of a young woman washes up on the black sands of the California beach Jericho Point, it’s identified as Evan Delaney’s. But Evan is very much alive—apparently the victim of an identity thief who was playing the Hollywood rich for everything they’re worth. The crook may be dead, but the crimes she was murdered for—crimes committed in Evan’s name—are turning Evan’s life into a nightmare. Now, in the shadow of a dead woman’s lies, it’s all Evan can do to survive.

Crosscut

For Evan Delaney, China Lake was a tough place to grow up. But she didn’t realize just how tough until, returning to the desert military base for her high school reunion, she discovers that a disturbing number of her classmates have died young.

Kill Chain

When Evan Delaney’s father disappears, the cops think he’s fled the country to avoid prosecution. But Evan is sure he’s been abducted or killed for reasons associated with his work for Naval Intelligence. As Evan hunts for clues, she’s attacked by an armed man. The attacker ends up dead—and turns out to be a federal agent. Now Evan is on the run, implicated in his murder. And then she’s contacted by a sinister duo—a madam and gigolo mother-and-son team who claim her father was mixed up in their very dirty business. Can Evan save her father’s reputation—and his life?

The Dirty Secrets Club

Jo Beckett is a forensic psychiatrist in San Francisco who does psychological autopsies in order to figure out whether the person died from an accident, suicide, or murder.

An ongoing string of high-profile and very public murder-suicides has San Francisco even more rattled than a string of recent earthquakes: A flamboyant fashion designer burns to death, clutching the body of his murdered lover. A superstar 49er jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. And most shocking of all, a U.S. attorney launches her BMW off a highway overpass, killing herself and three others. Enter forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett, hired by the SFPD to cut open not the victim’s body, but the victim’s life. Jo’s job is to complete the psychological autopsy, shedding light on the circumstances of any equivocal death. Soon she makes a shocking discovery: All the suicides belonged to something called the Dirty Secrets Club, a group of A-listers with nothing but money and plenty to hide.

The Memory Collector

Jo calls herself the dead-shrinker. She usually deals with the reasons for why a person died. But when she is called to work with someone still alive, Jo rushes to try to help the person – one who can’t form new memories and who might hold the secret to something horrible happening soon in San Francisco. And only Jo is the only one who can unlock the patient’s memories before it’s too late.

The Liar’s Lullaby

When Tasia McFarland, a pop singer who has found new success when she infused her songs with a political tirade, is shot during her own concert, Jo has to find out whether Tasha killer herself with her own gun or she was the victim of a shooting. And if she was, was she murdered or was it merely an accident?

The Nightmare Thief

Autumn Reiniger is a spoiled rich kid who wants something very special for her 21st birthday. She already got an expensive car and her apartment, but now her daddy must do something really out there for her. A party that nobody will ever forget. A role-playing cops and robbers game with fake guns, lots of shouting and crying, but none of them real.

The police are warned to stay away, so when real kidnappers get their chance of kidnapping daddy’s rich girl for money, nobody is there to help them. Except for Jo, of course. But this time, it might be too late for Jo as well, especially since she might not get out of this affair alive either.

UNSUB

Back in the 1990s, Mack Hendrix tried in vain to catch the Prophet, a serial killer so cunning that almost drove the policeman to the brink of madness. Now, 20 years later, Mack’s daughter, Caitlin Hendrix, catches a case that smells very much like the work of the Prophet. Is he really back? And if he is, can she catch the killer before she becomes a victim as well? The book is inspired by the real case of The Zodiac Killer.

Into the Black Nowhere

Caitlin Hendrix is now working with the FBI in their Behavioral Analysis Unit as a rookie agent. Women are disappearing every Saturday night in Solace, a small town in Texas. When she and her unit discover the body of a victim in the forest, and then another one not far away, they know they have a serial killer in at work. Especially when the MO is very similar in both cases. Now Caitlin mus

It enter the mind of the serial killer to learn how he picks them before it’s too late before he grabs his next innocent victim. The book is inspired by the real case of Ted Bundy.

The Dark Corners of the Night

In The Dark Corners of the Night, Caitlin Hendrix, the FBI profiler, is after a serial killer, a home invader who roams the Los Angeles freeways and randomly, silently kills mothers and fathers as they sleep.

Shadowheart

When two serial killers, Efrem Judah Goode and the Broken Heart Killer, compete with each other, it is up to FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix to figure out the connection between the two, and in order to do that, she has to enter the minds of these twisted people. If she can stop further killings, for her, it is worth going deep into the depths of their depraved minds, even if it means losing everything in the process.

Meg Gardiner Biography

Edgar Award winner author Meg Gardiner was born in 1957 in Oklahoma as the daughter of an English professor Frank C Gardiner and Sally Gardiner. During her childhood, her family soon moved to Santa Barbara, California, where she grew up. She attended Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, where she wrote for the school newspaper. She graduated from high school in 1975.

From then on she went to Stanford University, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. During this time she wrote several short stories in her spare time. Next, Meg Gardiner attended and graduated from Stanford Law School.

After finishing her studies, Meg Gardiner practiced law in Los Angeles for a while, before moving back to Santa Barbara, where she taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara .

In the early 1990s due to her husband’s job, she moved with him and their three young kids to the UK. Having time on her hands since she was out of a day job and was not interested in getting qualified to work as a barrister in the UK, Meg began writing thriller novels. She finished her first novel, China Lake, which was published in 2002 UK and several years later in the US.

During her stay in the UK, the author Meg Gardiner lived in Surrey near London until 2013 when she moved back to the US to Austin, Texas, where she is still living with her husband.

An interesting trivia about Meg Gardiner: She is not only an accomplished writer of books but also a three-time Jeopardy! champion.

Reading the Meg Gardiner novels in order for each series is recommended, not the least because there is a slight overlap between the Jo Beckett novels and Evan Delaney series.

My first contact with Meg Gardiner’s books was when I bought China Lake at a thrift store over 10 years ago. It turned out that it was the first Evan Delaney novel, so I hurried to buy the second one as well, Mission Canyon since it was already out.

Meg Gardiner’s first book in the UNSUB series is titled UNSUB, published in 2017, which will be made into a TV series by CBS, focusing on a female detective’s chase of an infamous serial killer which might be the not-yet-caught Zodiac killer. It is a series that currently includes three books.

In an interview, Meg Gardiner said that she writes crime fiction because it “gets to the heart of the human condition. It’s about people facing a severe danger, or confronting an evil that has invaded their world. It’s also fun.” Also, she likes to toss the readers into situations that they would hate in real life, such as sadistic killers and people in danger.

Meg Gardiner is currently the president of the Mystery Writers of America for 2019 and 2020. Reading her books in order for her three series is highly recommended.

Meg Gardiner Awards and Nominations

Dirty Secrets won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award for Best Procedural Novel in 2009
China Lake won the Edgar Award for best paperback original in 2009
The Nightmare Thief won the Audie Award for Thriller/Suspense Audiobook of the Year in 2012
UNSUB won the Barry Award in the Best Thriller category in 2018

Meg Gardiner Books in Order – Complete List