DI Fawley and Realism in Police Procedurals

I’ve alluded that, so far, I’ve been choosing not to write in depth about books or authors who I don’t connect with. While I’m going to say some mean-sounding things about Cara Hunter’s D.I. Fawley series, I want to stress that this is adamantly not me changing my policy. After all, I read SEVEN of these books in 2025. As of this writing, I am series complete! I’m not a completionist, I won’t finish a book–and certainly not a series–if I am not enjoying it. I stop reading books all the time, but not only do I finish the books in the Fawley series, I gallop through them. 

Before I get into the details, first, a brief introduction. Cara Hunter is a British author and best-seller. She has a detailed website that makes it clear she’s interested in true crime, crime shows, and the history of crime fiction. She’s a fan of the genre and I love that about her! (Sometimes her books even have fun references and easter eggs for fellow mystery and true crime heads.) The D.I. Adam Fawley series makes up the body of her work; outside of this series, she has only one stand-alone novel. The first Fawley book, Close to Home, was published in Britain in 2018 and the most recent, Making a Killing, came out this year in 2025. These books are police procedurals set in Oxford and its surroundings and they feature not only the titular Fawley, but his team of detectives. They lean towards the thriller side of a mystery-thriller spectrum in my opinion because they often include in their POV people involved in the case, including the criminals. This frequently puts the reader in the position of having more information than the detectives. Some of the cases will be familiar to people who also consume true crime content; at least one is very “ripped from the headlines.” (Not that this is new in crime fiction: The Murder on the Orient Express is also inspired by true crime, after all.) The crimes are often disturbing and sometimes involve children. 
 

And here's the part that may seem like I'm panning the series:  these books are silly. The forensic science functions like magic in wizard school books for tiny children:  it’s inexplicable and convenient, but also incredibly easy for any random villain to manipulate. I’m talking about villains capable of planting touch DNA levels of magic pseudo-science. Maybe this sort of DNA manipulation is technically possible (I'm not a scientist), but they're socially improbable. And the Oxford police are apparently free of bureaucracy and backlog, because DNA analysis happens within hours. It’s funny that the science and procedure of these police procedurals feels so out of step with everything I know about policing and science because Hunter works with several long-term consulting partners and even has a podcast with several of them. Maybe they do it differently in Oxford! 
 

The impressive competence of the police is only outdone by that of the villains, who are the most evil people to EVER walk the earth. Psychopaths and sociopaths are real and rampant in Adam Fawley’s Oxford. They come in all ages and genders, though they do tend to lean female; included in their ranks is at least one child mastermind. In addition to their abundance, the psychopaths of Fawley’s Oxford are all geniuses, capable of outsmarting the police and manipulating evidence. And these aren't once-in-a-lifetime brushes with evil for the detectives: they encounter these diabolical criminals regularly, every year or two. 

I don't know why it feels so silly. I'm not fussy about Jessica Fletcher stumbling over so many dead bodies, I don't care that some Agatha Christie books are improbable. I think the feeling that these are extra silly comes from my expectations of the police procedural subgenre:  I do expect the "procedure" to be believable-to-its-time even if the crimes aren't. I had to recalibrate my expectations away from strict realism to enjoy these books, and once I did, found a lot to enjoy. In fact, the series has several characteristics that I particularly enjoy and am always looking for in modern series: 

• Multimedia or multivocal presentation – I like when mystery books include documents, and I like when they have multiple perspectives. This series has both:  multiple points of view and a narrative that is interwoven with letters, emails, news articles, social media posts, police reports, phone conversation transcripts, podcast scripts, etc. I don’t want every single book to follow this style, but when this style is done well I usually enjoy it. 
• High quality audiobook - I especially enjoy this approach when it’s handled well in audio. These audiobooks are a gold standard for multiple narrators done well. Each book has multiple narrators and (aside from the occasional wobbly Irish or American accent), each is quite good. I may even enjoy the "document collage" style even more when it's presented in a well-done audio. 
• Teamwork makes the dreamwork - Especially in police procedurals, I love reading about collaborative mystery solving. Yeah, yeah, I do like the Harry Bosch books and consider them my flagship police procedural series. But I really enjoy interpersonal conflict and agreement, multiple perspectives and disagreements, flashes of brilliance spread around and that build upon one another. It just feels more realistic, especially in the workplace setting that is the police procedural.
• The steady march of time - Building off the above, I automatically prefer modern books that exist in a temporal stream over ones that keep their characters suspended in amber. Hunter's characters undergo big life events that change their relationships to their work, and I think that's neat.

A flip side of these characteristics is that I don't think they're all done at a top standard. In particular, while I like the large cast of detectives,  I don’t think they are as interesting or as deep as, for example, the cast in Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway books. The pleasure in Hunter's detectives is not their individual strength, but that they make up an interesting collective, with different approaches and personalities having both synergy and conflict. Still, character work is not Hunter's strong suite, and the shallowness of the villains that I mentioned above is a black mark against these books. I'm also on the fence about ripped-from-the-headlines and sensationalist plots that are sort of the natural outcome of insanely evil criminals. So far, I've felt like the series more or less stays on the acceptable line of the lurid element of crime, in part because I think Hunter demonstrates through some of the essays that I've read that she is thinking deeply about true crime and crime fiction and making very intentional decisions about tropes and how she is subverting or repurposing them. That said, the series does walk that line and I wouldn't necessarily recommend the series to everyone--it's not one I've suggested to my mom, also a crime reader, for example.

While it's not on my list of favorite characteristics, the books are just undeniably propulsive. I tear through them on audio, and as some of my other current ongoing series are a bit of a slog on audio, it's nice to spice them up with books that are gripping even if they're not great. I don't usually assign scores, but this series is a solid 3/5 stars for me, never topping out more than 3.5, but also rarely dipping below 3.