Colin Campbell Books In Order

Publication Order of Black & Decker Books

Publication Order of Grant and McNulty Thriller Books

Publication Order of Mick Habergham Books

Publication Order of Resurrection Man Books

Publication Order of Vince McNulty Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Colin Campbell is a British author of mystery and thriller novels. He served in the British army for three years and later joined the police force and served for 30 years as a cop. It was his service in the police department that opened the doorway to his new career as a full-time crime writer. Besides writing, Colin is an international tennis player.

Campbell became a published author in 2012 when Jamaica Plain, the first book in Resurrection Man series was published. Since then more than five sequels have been published. The author has also written a standalone novel, Northern Ex published in 2017. Campbell is a resident of Yorkshire, England and a member of Mystery Writers of America and counts Lee Child, Caroline Carver, Reginald Hill, and Stephen Booth as his fans.

Northern Ex

In Colin Campbell’s standalone novel, Northern Ex, we meet Vince McNulty, a retired cop and the main character in this story. He spends most of his days visiting massage parlors and watching classic movies of the ’60s and ’70s like The Dirty Dozen and Von Ryan’s Express.
It’s to be noted that Colin Campbell spent three decades serving as a cop in the British police department and uses his experiences in the force to present a gritty authenticity in Northern Ex.

Before getting into a detailed review of Northern Ex, here is a word of caution, even though potential readers might have already figured it out from the subject matter above. This novel contains some graphic violence, strong language, and some graphic though not pornographic detailing of behind the scenes activities in the so-called massage parlors.

As the novel opens up, we meet the decorated career cop having been kicked off the police force after having beaten to death a child molester, and the blowback comes to the police department. Now that he’s out of the police force, he spends most of his days drifting around in Northern England and visiting every massage parlor he can find. During one of his visits, he comes to learn that the Northern eX-chain of massage parlors he regularly visits has a darker side, one that deals with trafficking of underage girls, some who disappear without a trace from the massage parlors. The police get involved when a brutally mutilated body of one of the girls is discovered in an oil barrel, and since our man McNulty is a regular visitor of one of the parlors where the girls are reported to vanish, he becomes a prime suspect.

There’s a whole lot of new mystery to the story when McNulty begins investigating what happened to the girls. But getting to know what happened, rescuing the girls and ending the trafficking ring are two completely different matters since there’s a lot of bad guys as tough as he is and way more sadistic. The author does a fantastic job in detailing the action, and there’s plenty of it, especially when McNulty and the cop begin pursuing the bad guys.

But there’s more to this story than just a simple action thriller. Colin Campbell vividly describes his hero’s thoughts as well as his background and McNulty proves to be more of a British version of Travis McGee.

Additionally, McNulty’s obsession with the old classic movies also brings on an additional dimension to Northern Ex especially for film buff readers who grew up on the same film McNulty watches over and over. Fans of such movies will easily understand the references to the movies mentioned in the story. And in a twisted turn of events, the villain in the story also proves to be well accustomed with the film himself. As for McNulty, a man who matches his behaviors as those of Get Carter’s hitman, he’s a great guy you’d wish to meet in any mystery thriller novel.

Jamaica Plain

Jamaica Plain is the first book in the Resurrection Man series. We meet Grant who’s sent to Boston to interview a prisoner and also to keep him under watch for a while. But the prisoner is dies up during the question, and the photos of Grant sent to the hospital make the headlines.

The prisoner’s brother who doesn’t have records with the police is in his home and keeps the police away with his rifle. Grant approaches the apartment unarmed and with his hands spread wide and live on TV, and this earns him a nickname, The Resurrection Man.

The Resurrection Man, Jim Grant an English police officer is in Boston on a temporary mission, and his instructions are pretty simple, to keep out of trouble. But for him, staying away from trouble isn’t an option, even if he doesn’t have a gun. The first thing he does as soon as he lands in Boston is to purchase a map, second gets laid, and thirdly he almost gets blown up to pieces while interviewing Freddy Sullivan, the prisoner he came to question.
With a mysterious inner calm and the fists of a fighter, he leaves a long trail of burned out buildings and broken bad guys behind him. And thanks to a public encounter with a crazy gunman Grant finds himself trending across the evening news given a new nickname, the Resurrection Man.

Montecito Heights

Montecito Heights is the second novel in Colin’s Campbell’s series The Resurrection Man. After arriving in Boston from Yorkshire to interview a prisoner, events escalated to the worst after a political bombing scheme and an encounter with a mad man wielding a gun. Grant made the evening news, and this resulted to him being offered a job as a cop in the US.

Now he works with the Boston Police Department, but he is more of an on-call troubleshooter. Now in the second novel in the series, we meet Grant sent to Los Angeles where the careers of a Police Chief and a Senator are intertwined inseparably. His job is to protect the LAP, but the path that leads to that goal might involve finding the ways of the Senator’s beautiful daughter involved in the pornography film industry.