The Ray Holder Series
Birmingham crime fiction that respects your time.
Ray Holder isn’t a detective anymore. He’s a man who still notices when things don’t add up — and in a city that has learned to look away, that’s enough to get him into trouble.
Slow-burn, socially grounded, and unsparing. Short chapters, clipped dialogue, no padding — each one finishable in an evening.
Free prequel novella
Start with Clean Hands
Birmingham, February 2009. A bank manager is found dead in the Sidings — one stab wound, no witnesses, and a department that wants it filed as a mugging by Friday. Detective Sergeant Ray Holder isn't so sure a mugging goes wrong like this.
Short chapters, no padding, finishable in an evening. Yours free — Kindle, ePub or PDF.
The books
Three Ray Holder cases, newest first
Each one stands on its own. Each one is under two hundred pages. Start wherever you like — or start at the beginning.
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Hit and Run
A housing activist is killed on Icknield Port Road. The council calls it tragic. Ray reads her notebook instead.
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The Cut
A body beneath the ring-road underpass, an easy answer nobody wants questioned, and something organised moving through the lock-ups.
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Murder on the Stairs
Yasmin Khan is found dead on the stairwell and the official story arrives fast. Her notebook says otherwise.
The Ray Holder Series
Where should I start?
Four books, one city, one man who keeps picking up cases everyone else has agreed to put down. There’s a reading order — and a free way in.
A new series — November 2026
Silent Halls
A different city and a different kind of dread. Clair Harlow is a dark-academia psychological thriller set inside the closed, glittering world of an elite institution — where the danger isn’t a body in an alley, it’s the slow, precise humiliation of not belonging.
If Ray Holder is what happens when a city stops watching out for its own, Clair Harlow is what happens when an institution decides who counts as one of its own in the first place.
About the author
Crime fiction from a city that presses in
Joe Gaston writes lean, character-driven crime fiction set in a fictionalised Birmingham — real streets, real geography, invented estates. He came to fiction after years in ministry and a spell helping plant a church on a council estate outside Newport, an experience that put the forgotten-people theme at the centre of everything he writes.
“I often talk about the ring road as a belt that is one notch too tight.”
