Tim Weaver Books in Order (Updated September 10, 2026)

Tim Weaver is best known for the David Raker missing-person mysteries, a long-running British crime series built around disappearances that appear impossible. Raker is a former journalist who becomes a specialist investigator for families whose loved ones have vanished, often discovering that the missing person was hiding a life no one around them truly understood.

The principal series now contains fifteen novels from Chasing the Dead through The Lost Women. Weaver has also written the standalone thriller Missing Pieces, the Raker novella collection The Shadow at the Door, and The Line, which begins a separate Deadly Ambition series.

David Raker solves disappearances that should not be possible

Raker does not investigate only people who walked away voluntarily. Weaver repeatedly constructs cases where a disappearance seems to violate physical evidence: someone enters a train but never exits, a whole village vanishes overnight, a family disappears from a boat in less than a minute, or a man emerges from surgery with another person’s face.

Each case can largely be followed on its own, but Raker’s friendship with former detective Colm Healy and the consequences of earlier investigations become increasingly important. Publication order is therefore the best route.

David Raker books from Alex Towne to The Lost Women

1. Chasing the Dead (2010): Mary Towne asks Raker to find her son Alex even though Alex was officially identified as the victim of a fatal car crash, forcing Raker to discover how a dead man could apparently have been seen alive.
2. The Dead Tracks (2011): Straight-A student Megan Carver disappears despite having no obvious reason to run, and Raker’s search leads toward frightened witnesses, murdered associates, and a forest once used by a serial killer.
3. Vanished (2012): Sam Wren boards a London Underground train and is never seen leaving it, giving Raker an apparently impossible disappearance with no witness or camera footage explaining where Sam went.
4. Never Coming Back (2013): Carrie Ling and her entire family disappear from their home while dinner is still cooking, and Raker uncovers a decades-old cover-up while trying to understand why every member vanished together.
5. Fall from Grace (2014): Retired senior detective Leonard Franks walks outside his isolated Dartmoor farmhouse to collect firewood and simply disappears, leaving Raker to investigate a man who understood police procedure better than most missing people.
6. What Remains (2015): Former detective Colm Healy is consumed by the unsolved murders of a mother and her twin daughters, and Raker helps reopen the case even as obsession threatens to destroy both men.
7. Broken Heart (2016): Lynda Korin drives to a secluded Somerset beauty spot, leaves her possessions in the car, and disappears without ever being recorded leaving the location.
8. I Am Missing (2017): A young man wakes bruised and without any memory of his name or past, and Raker is hired to solve the unusual problem of a person who is missing from his own identity.
9. You Were Gone (2019): Raker is told that his dead wife has walked into a police station and asked for him, creating a disappearance case so personal that even his own certainty about the past begins to come under pressure.
10. No One Home (2019): All nine residents of the isolated village of Black Gale vanish after a Halloween dinner party, leaving no bodies, no obvious struggle, and almost no evidence of what happened.
11. The Blackbird (2022): Cate and Aiden Gascoigne drive off the road into a ninety-foot ravine, but when emergency workers reach their burning vehicle there are no bodies inside.
12. The Last Goodbye (2023): Tom Brenner and his nine-year-old son vanish inside a theme-park ghost house while another woman receives a letter supposedly written by the mother who disappeared from her life forty years earlier.
13. The Missing Family (2024): Three members of the Fowler family vanish from a dinghy on a Dartmoor lake in less than a minute while Colm Healy investigates a murder suspect who disappears from a locked casino holding cell.
14. The Lost Women (2026): Raker investigates a surgical patient who vanishes and is apparently replaced by another man, only to find a connection with three documentary filmmakers who disappeared on the Cornish coast eighteen years earlier.

The Lost Women is the latest released David Raker novel as of September 10, 2026.

Chasing the Dead starts by asking whether a corpse can still be missing

Alex Towne disappeared years before his body was apparently found in a wrecked vehicle.

His mother later becomes convinced she has seen him alive. Raker initially assumes grief has created a case of mistaken identity, but investigating Alex’s past reveals secrets his family never knew and people willing to kill to keep those secrets hidden.

The Dead Tracks shows why Raker distrusts the obvious runaway story

Megan Carver appears to be the kind of teenager least likely to vanish voluntarily. She is academically successful, close to her family, and not known for reckless behavior.

Raker nevertheless assumes everyone has secrets. People near Megan begin dying or refusing to speak, and the trail eventually reaches a forest associated with a notorious killer.

Vanished turns the Underground into a locked-room mystery

Sam Wren enters a Tube train in London but apparently never gets off.

There are no witnesses who can explain the disappearance and no useful footage showing him leaving the network. Raker therefore has to determine which assumption about Sam’s journey is wrong rather than simply searching the city for a missing commuter.

Never Coming Back removes an entire family at once

Emily Kane arrives at her sister Carrie’s home expecting a normal evening. The front door is open, dinner is cooking, and the family should still be there.

Carrie, her husband, and their daughters have all vanished. The untouched house suggests they did not plan to leave, while the investigation gradually exposes a secret powerful enough to explain why several people had to disappear together.

Fall from Grace gives Raker a missing detective

Leonard Franks spent decades investigating other people before retiring to an isolated farmhouse.

He walks outside for firewood and never comes back. The simplicity of the disappearance is precisely what makes it difficult: there is no journey to reconstruct, no obvious reason to run, and no easy explanation for how a highly experienced detective could vanish beside his own house.

What Remains makes Colm Healy’s obsession the case

Former Metropolitan Police detective Colm Healy has already been damaged by the murders of a mother and her twin daughters.

He could not identify the killer or even establish a convincing motive. His inability to let the case go costs him his career and family.

Raker is one of the few people still willing to help him. Their attempt to solve the murders deepens one of the series’ most important relationships and makes What Remains especially important to later books.

Broken Heart traps a disappearance inside one camera-covered location

Lynda Korin is recorded driving into a secluded car park. She leaves her purse and phone in the vehicle and throws away her keys.

The problem is that there is no evidence of her leaving. Raker has to explain both the mechanics of her disappearance and why a healthy woman with no obvious financial or personal crisis would abandon everything.

I Am Missing reverses Raker’s usual question

Most clients ask Raker to find someone else. Richard Kite asks Raker to find Richard Kite.

The young man woke with no memory of his name, family, friends, or past. Ten months of publicity and police work produce nothing.

Raker therefore has to rebuild a human identity from clues rather than track a known person from a last confirmed location.

You Were Gone weaponizes Raker’s grief

Raker’s wife Derryn died years earlier, and her loss is one of the reasons he understands the families of missing people so well.

When police tell him a woman claiming to be Derryn has appeared asking for him, the mystery attacks the most emotionally certain fact in his life.

This book should not be used as an entry point because its premise gains much of its power from everything readers already know about Raker’s grief.

No One Home makes a whole village disappear

Black Gale has only nine residents. On Halloween they gather for dinner, take photographs, and spend the evening together.

By morning every one of them is gone. Two and a half years later, their families hire Raker because official investigation has failed to determine whether the nine neighbors are hiding, dead, or part of something no one has yet understood.

The Blackbird leaves an empty vehicle at the bottom of a ravine

Cate and Aiden Gascoigne are seen laughing inside their Land Rover only seconds before it plunges from the road.

The vehicle catches fire badly enough that emergency responders expect to find bodies. Instead, the wreck is empty.

Raker’s investigation eventually links the impossible crash with an infamous murder committed three decades earlier.

The Last Goodbye runs two disappearances forty years apart

Tom Brenner and his nine-year-old son Leo enter a ghost-house attraction at Seven Peaks theme park and do not emerge.

At the same time, Rebekah Murphy receives a letter supposedly written by Fiona, the mother who walked out when Rebekah was three.

Raker’s job is initially to determine whether Fiona is still alive, but the investigation begins connecting the forty-year-old disappearance with the Brenners’ seemingly impossible vanishing.

The Missing Family gives Raker and Healy parallel impossibilities

Sarah Fowler watches her husband and children paddle away from shore on a Dartmoor lake. Less than a minute later, the dinghy is floating empty.

Meanwhile, Colm Healy investigates a murder suspect who disappears from a locked holding room at a London casino despite guards stationed outside.

The two cases initially appear unrelated, but Raker and Healy eventually discover that both impossibilities conceal the same dangerous secret.

The Lost Women reaches back to Raker’s journalism career

Before becoming a missing-person investigator, Raker worked as a journalist. One unresolved story from eighteen years earlier has remained with him.

Three women were making a documentary about a missing student on the Cornish coast when they also vanished. No bodies were found.

In the present, Raker investigates Preston Stewart, who undergoes facial surgery after a car accident. When the bandages are removed, Preston’s wife insists the man beneath them is not her husband.

The new case and the old Lost Women mystery become connected, bringing Raker and Colm Healy into a forty-eight-hour race.

The Shadow at the Door is the Raker companion collection

• The Shadow at the Door (2021): A limited-edition collection of four David Raker novellas that gives Raker shorter investigations outside the sequence of full-length numbered novels.

Treat the collection as supplemental Raker material. It does not replace one of the fifteen main novels and is not necessary for understanding the principal sequence.

Missing Pieces is Weaver without David Raker

• Missing Pieces (2021): Rebekah Murphy is stranded on an abandoned island with a killer hunting her and a secret she cannot remember, while detective Frank Travis searches for another missing woman on the mainland.

The two characters appear to occupy separate stories, but each possesses part of the same mystery.

Missing Pieces is a standalone and does not feature David Raker. It can be read at any point.

The Line begins another Tim Weaver series in 2026

• The Line (2026): The first Deadly Ambition novel launches a separate crime story outside David Raker and marks Weaver’s move into another continuing fictional world.

Do not insert The Line between The Missing Family and The Lost Women. It belongs to a different series even though it was published during the same period.

Why Colm Healy matters almost as much as some missing people

Colm Healy begins as a Metropolitan Police detective whose life is eventually destroyed by an unsolved murder case.

His friendship with Raker becomes one of the major emotional threads running through the series. What Remains places Healy especially close to the center, while later books such as The Missing Family and The Lost Women again give him substantial investigative responsibility.

Raker’s journalism background explains how he works

Raker is not a conventional private detective trained primarily through police service.

His journalism career taught him how to find people, build sources, reconstruct histories, notice contradictions, search records, and persuade reluctant witnesses to talk.

The Lost Women makes that former career especially important because the investigation reaches directly back to a story he once covered.

A compact David Raker order for new readers

1. Chasing the Dead: Learn who Raker is through Alex Towne’s impossible return from death.
2. Vanished: See Weaver turn the London Underground into a disappearance puzzle.
3. Never Coming Back: Follow Raker through the disappearance of an entire family.
4. What Remains: Understand Colm Healy and the relationship that becomes vital later.
5. I Am Missing: Read a case where the missing person has lost his own identity.
6. No One Home: Move to the disappearance of an entire village.
7. The Blackbird: Solve the mystery of an empty car at the bottom of a ravine.
8. The Lost Women: Reach the current endpoint and a mystery tied to Raker’s journalism past.

This sampler skips major personal continuity. Readers who become invested in Raker and Healy should return to Book 2 and continue through all fifteen in order.

David Raker publication order at a glance

1. Chasing the Dead (2010): A dead son is apparently seen alive.
2. The Dead Tracks (2011): Megan Carver vanishes and a forest hides old violence.
3. Vanished (2012): Sam Wren disappears from a Tube train.
4. Never Coming Back (2013): A family disappears from its home.
5. Fall from Grace (2014): Retired detective Leonard Franks vanishes beside his farmhouse.
6. What Remains (2015): Raker helps Colm Healy reopen an unsolved triple murder.
7. Broken Heart (2016): Lynda Korin disappears from a camera-covered car park.
8. I Am Missing (2017): Richard Kite does not know who he is.
9. You Were Gone (2019): A woman claiming to be Raker’s dead wife asks for him.
10. No One Home (2019): Nine residents vanish from Black Gale.
11. The Blackbird (2022): A couple disappears from a burning vehicle.
12. The Last Goodbye (2023): A father and son vanish inside a ghost-house ride.
13. The Missing Family (2024): Three people vanish from a boat while a prisoner disappears from a locked room.
14. The Lost Women (2026): A missing surgical patient connects with three women who disappeared eighteen years earlier.

Current Tim Weaver series status

As of September 10, 2026, the David Raker series has reached fifteen published novels through The Lost Women.

Weaver has also published the Raker companion collection The Shadow at the Door, the standalone Missing Pieces, and the separate 2026 novel The Line.

Questions before starting Tim Weaver

What Tim Weaver book should I read first?

Start with Chasing the Dead. It introduces David Raker and the missing-person structure that defines the series.

How many David Raker novels are there?

There are fifteen principal novels through The Lost Women as of September 2026.

Can the Raker books be read out of order?

The immediate mysteries can usually be understood independently, but publication order is recommended because Raker’s personal history and Colm Healy’s storyline continue across books.

Is The Shadow at the Door a numbered Raker novel?

No. It is a collection of four David Raker novellas and should be treated as companion material.

Is Missing Pieces a David Raker book?

No. It is an independent thriller centered on Rebekah Murphy and Detective Frank Travis.

What is the latest David Raker book?

The Lost Women, released in 2026, is David Raker Book 15 and the latest published installment as of this update.

Does The Lost Women connect with earlier Raker history?

Yes. Its cold case dates back to Raker’s earlier career as a journalist, while Colm Healy also plays an important role in the present-day investigation.

Is The Line a David Raker novel?

No. It begins a separate series and should not be inserted into Raker’s numbering.

The Tim Weaver order that preserves the disappearing acts

Read David Raker from Chasing the Dead through The Lost Women in publication order. Add The Shadow at the Door as optional shorter material once you already know Raker.

Keep Missing Pieces on the standalone shelf and The Line with its separate Deadly Ambition series.

That arrangement protects the continuity that matters most: Raker’s evolution from grieving former journalist to veteran missing-person specialist, and his complicated friendship with Colm Healy across fifteen increasingly impossible disappearances.