Do I need to read Pauline Rowson's DI Andy Horton crime novels in order?

Do I need to read the DI Andy Horton series in order? I am often asked this when I give talks and when people contact me through my website. The answer is no you don't need to read them in order because it can never be determined which book a reader might buy online or from a bookshop or borrow from a library first. Some readers have told me that they've discovered Andy Horton in a later book in the series and then having done so have gone back to the beginning and read them in sequence.  

There are now now ten in the DI Andy Horton series    with number ten, Death Surge, published by Severn House in the UK and Commonwealth this month ( September 2013) and in the USA on 1 January.  So DI Horton has come a long way since first appearing in Tide of Death in 2006. 

In each DI Andy Horton there is an element of the main character’s personal life to follow, which to some extent, has an impact on the plots, but each novel contains a new murder mystery to be solved and that mystery is resolved at the end of each book.


In DI Andy Horton number one, Tide of Death, Andy is back in CID after being suspended for eight months on a gross misconduct charge.  His marriage has broken up and he's living on board his yacht in a marina in Portsmouth on the South Coast of England. He has a murder to solve and is determined to clear his name and re-establish his reputation as a good cop and try and save his marriage, but is it too late for that?

In DI Andy Horton number three, The Suffocating Sea, he discovers something about his mother's disappearance thirty years ago which sets  him on a mission to discover why his mother (Jennifer) abandoned him at the age of ten, where she went and what subsequently happened to her.  This thread is followed  throughout the subsequent novels but if the reader picks up and reads the novels out of sequence he or she should be able to follow the thread of Andy's private investigation in each novel. 




The DI Andy Horton novels in order, with the first in the series listed at the top, are:

Tide of Death
Deadly Waters
The Suffocating Sea
Dead Man's Wharf
Blood on the Sand
Footsteps on the Shore
A Killing Coast
Death Lies Beneath
Undercurrent
Death Surge  

You can read more about each DI Andy Horton novel by clicking on the link on each title

I enjoy writing the DI Andy Horton series and seeing the characters' lives unfold. I'm currently writing the eleventh DI Andy Horton with ideas for number twelve. So a lot more yet to come.