Liverpool doesn't do clean endings.
Neither does Rafferty Cole.
Rafferty Cole is a private detective working the streets of Liverpool — a city he knows too well and trusts too little. Ex-SAS. Ex-Merseyside Police. He left both under circumstances he doesn’t talk about, and now he takes the cases nobody else will touch.
The Rafferty Cole series is dark, fast, and set in a Liverpool you won’t find on a tourist map. If you like your crime fiction with sharp edges and no easy answers, you’re in the right place.
Three books, three cases, one city that keeps pulling Rafferty Cole back in. All available now on Amazon Kindle and paperback.
The Donaghue Girl
A fifteen-year-old girl has been missing for three days. Her parents came to Rafferty Cole rather than the police because their daughter was caught with cannabis at school, and they can’t afford scrutiny.
Neither can Rafferty — but for different reasons.
He used to be Merseyside Police. Now he works from a small office in Liverpool with equipment that would make most detective units jealous, and a reputation built on cases nobody else would take. He’s sharp, methodical, and doesn’t give up. He also has unfinished business with this city’s criminal world — business that ended his career and still sits at the back of everything he does.
The Donaghue family is old Liverpool money. Property. Development. The kind of dinner invitations that come with civic duty attached. Patrick Donaghue is quiet about where some of that money comes from. Rafferty notices the things people choose not to say.
Megan didn’t disappear because of the cannabis. Rafferty works that out quickly. What takes longer — what keeps pulling at him long after he should have let it go — is the shape of something larger underneath. Because in the days before she vanished, Megan had started asking questions she shouldn’t have known to ask. And somewhere in those questions, she found an answer that put her in serious danger.
Liverpool holds its secrets well. So does the criminal network running beneath its surface: drugs and people moving between the docks of this city and the streets of Dublin, fronted by hotel companies and property consultants and the well-pressed suits of men who sit on charity boards. This is the world Rafferty stumbled into once before. That stumble cost him his career.
He doesn’t know the full truth of that yet. But he’s getting closer.
Rafferty — The Donaghue Girl is the first book in the Rafferty Cole series. Dark, fast-moving, and set deep in the streets of Liverpool — with one missing girl at the centre, and something much larger just below the surface.
If you like crime fiction that doesn’t flinch and keeps moving long past midnight, this is where the series begins.
Dead Signal
Seven people died at The Tidal. A waterfront restaurant in Liverpool, a Thursday evening, a device that security services immediately read as republican. Within forty-eight hours the investigation was in counter-terrorism hands, and the original team was off the case.
Mo Mortimer is twenty-seven years old, a Manchester rapper with a management deal and a growing career. His brother Terence was at the table that night. Mo doesn’t want justice from the people who took the case away from the people who knew Liverpool. He wants someone who will actually look.
Rafferty Cole looks.
What starts as a bombing becomes a property dispute, and then a money trail, and then something considerably larger. Because The Tidal sat on land that had been circled by developers for years. And Terence Mortimer wasn’t the only person at that table who had become inconvenient to someone with the means and the patience to solve problems quietly.
Rafferty has been rebuilding his reputation from a small office above a Liverpool car park since the case that ended his police career. He’s methodical, technically capable, and prepared to follow a corporate chain through as many holding companies and Channel Island registrations as it takes. He’s also learning that the criminal organisation threading through this city is more sophisticated than it appeared when he first ran into it. Someone designed the architecture. Someone who understood from the inside how investigations work, where they look, and where they can’t reach.
She’s been here for eighteen months. She knows he’s getting close.
Rafferty — The Dead Signal is the second book in the Rafferty Cole series. Darker and faster than the first, with a case that begins at the waterfront and reaches further than Rafferty expected — and a threat that is patient, methodical, and already watching.
If you stayed up too late reading the first one, this won’t help.
The Dublin Run
Frank Heskett is dead.
He was a retired Detective Superintendent, 68 years old, found in his kitchen on a Tuesday evening after his regular walk. The police are calling it a break-in.
Rafferty Cole knows exactly what it is.
Frank spent the last three years of his life quietly building a case he couldn’t build through official channels — cross-border correspondence with a Garda detective in Dublin, carefully assembled intelligence, a signed statement he pressed into Rafferty’s hands in a car park and told him not to open. He had been building toward something. He was getting close.
They got there first.
Now Rafferty is on the first flight to Dublin, carrying eight years of unfinished business. The detective at the other end of the line is DI Siobhan Reilly — Garda organised crime, eighteen months into building a case against Cathal Brennan, the man who runs the criminal network Rafferty has been circling across two investigations. The corporate architecture is there: Isle of Man shell companies, offshore trusts, a money-laundering chain running between Liverpool and the Dublin Docklands. What Reilly cannot do — what no filing or document trail has yet been able to give her — is place a person at the centre of it.
For that she needs a human voice from inside the machine.
For that, she needs Rafferty.
The conspiracy that ended his career and kept him looking over his shoulder for eight years is finally within reach. The people who ordered Frank Heskett’s death are identifiable. The evidence package is almost complete.
But Lena Cassidy — the woman responsible for the most dangerous decisions the organisation has made — is somewhere in Europe, watching to see how things unfold. And she will not wait indefinitely.
Neither will Rafferty.
Rafferty — The Dublin Run is the third and final book in the Rafferty Cole series.
The case and the conspiracy have been running on parallel tracks since a missing girl in Liverpool first pointed toward something larger than anyone expected. (Rafferty – The Donaghue Girl)
In Dublin, those tracks converge. Every thread from Books 1 and 2 resolves here.