DI Joe Faraday's Management Assistant, Vanessa Parry, is dead. Killed in a head-on car smash. Her funeral is a bitter end to another grim week in the front line of the ongoing war against Portsmouth's surging crimewave. And now the seemingly untouchable DC Paul Winter, master of the scam, has been hurt in a way he could never have imagined: his wife has cancer. It's inoperable and she has barely three months to live. Paul Winter has only one instinct - to lash out. But there's precious little time for grief on a Portsmouth CID squad. A disgraced gynaecologist is missing and his caseload of maimed women is a murder-suspect list from hell. It all adds up to an impossible workload and that's without the suits and the politicians conspiring to make it even harder...

Media graduate Julie Emerson is new to London, but London isn't an easy city. An affair with her boss becomes all-consuming whilst her upstairs neighbour first alarms then terrifies her. Both men, in their separate ways, want all of her, at whatever cost. 

With local democracy undermined at every turn, anger with political impotence creates a hunger for change and a fledgling political party struggles to establish itself in Portsmouth. Slowly, Whitehall begins to wake up to the threat. Today, Portsmouth, tomorrow? 

Portsmouth is a city on the ropes, a poor, dirty but spirited city, with a soaring crime rate. And it is home for DI Joe Faraday. Faraday has made it in the CID through diligence, an unswerving commitment to principle and an uncanny knack for gauging character. Slow to make friends, a widower bringing up his profoundly deaf son, Faraday pushes himself hard and expects the same from his colleagues. Stories abound of the quiet DI's sudden, volcanic outbursts of fury directed at inferiors and superiors alike who haven't matched his own exacting standards. An enigma to those he works with, Faraday's refuge from the desperate business of policing his hometown is his passion for the natural world and the bird life that teems on the beaches and estuaries of the South coast. And now the sinking of one of the yachts in the Fastnet race is beginning to look like the perfect cover for a murder that cuts to the core of Portsmouth's money set. But only Joe Faraday believes it happened. 

"Backstory" is a book-length companion piece to the critically-acclaimed and commercially successful series of crime fiction novels set in Portsmouth and featuring D/I Joe Faraday and D/C Paul Winter. I wrote it in response to literally hundreds of e-mails from readers wanting to find out more about the books. Where do they come from? Why do they feel so real, so authentic? In short, what does it take to turn the small print of sharp-end CID work in one of the UK's roughest cities into page-turning drama? All this - and much, much more - lie within these pages.

A man, chained inside a tunnel and then dismembered and scattered along the tracks by the early morning train from Portsmouth to London. The beginning of DI Joe Faraday's most gruesome case yet. A bizarre suicide? The cruelest of murders? Checking the list of missing persons as the police attempt to identify the body DC Winter comes across a missing man, someone who stepped out of their ordered life with no hint of leaving. He's not the man in the tunnel, he's simply disappeared. The only person he can find who knew him works in the city morgue. Once again Graham Hurley has taken his forensic skill to the lives of people, victims, criminals and police, struggling to survive life in a modern British city. With his trademark realism and his focus on two very different policeman; one awkward and by the book, the other bolshy and walking the thinnest of lines, Hurley's Faraday and Winter novels are earning ever more spectacular reviews, and building readership. One Under: two deaths, two tangles of emotions and thwarted love, one brilliant microcosm of Britain today. 

The discovery of a headless corpse on the rocks below cliffs on the Isle of Wight is only the beginning of a journey for DI Joe Faraday to the centre of the grim trade in human cargo from the crippled societies of the Balkans. From cheap labour to prostitution, Portsmouth, like every other city in the UK is home to untold human misery; a black economy built on illegal immigration. Joe Faraday is determined to find the real criminals that lie behind the tabloid hysteria. Detective Constable Winter on the other hand is determinded only to find a way out of the disciplinary action that threatens his entire career. A burgeoning relationship with a young prostitute isn't exactly helping his cause. Graham Hurley has written another vivid novel of all too human policeman struggling against an overwhelming tide of crime. This is crime writing with a vivid edge of documentary realism. 

Features anti-personnel mines, Africa, and the journey one woman makes to find the person responsible for the death of her son in Angola. This book is both an examination of what bereavement means to one character and an indictment of the arms trade. 

When Ellie's husband is killed in an accident her world falls apart. Her husband's company is in debt and, in order to keep it going, she must learn to fly the World War II fighter plane it was built around. She must also find answers to the questions of what really lies behind her husband's death. 

As ex-drug baron Bazza Mackenzie runs for parliament, ex-cop Paul Winter knows that his time with Bazza must, at whatever cost, come to an end, in the 12th in this highly acclaimed series of police procedurals DI Faraday is gone and the police are left reeling. As his boss attempts to limit any possible PR damage, his one time shadow on the force, ex-DC Winter, is ever more concerned that he may have made the biggest mistake of his life throwing in his lot with the city's drug baron, Bazza McKenzie—especially as Bazza becomes increasingly desperate and violent as his empire begins to crumble under the weight of austere times. And, in the person of DS Jummy Suttle there's a new will at the heart of the embattled police force to nail Bazza once and for all, the one man Faraday was always desperate to bring to justice. Graham Hurley's trademark authenticity has been allied to an ever increasing sense of drama as he charts the lives of his vivid characters and paints a stunning portrait of a city and a country at war with itself, a war which throws the police into the front line.

Keogh, an investigative journalist, stumbles on the story that the Gulf War may have been fought to a pre-arranged script. When he starts asking questions the security forces take notice and an MI5 officer, Sarah, is sent to befriend him and find out what he knows. 

The new Faraday and Winter novel takes DI Faraday to the very edge. A car accident during a holiday in the Middle East lands Faraday in a hospital packed with the maimed from Gaza, where he embarks on a wild scheme to adopt a horribly burned Palestinian girl. Back in England crimelord Bazza McKenzie is watching his empire fall apart under the pressures of the biggest recession in 70 years. Desperate times call fordesperate measures and soon ex-cop Winter is in the thick of it as Bazza runs out of options.

D/C Winter has gone undercover in an attempt to infiltrate the inner circle of the city's premier drug's lord Bazza McKenzie. Isolated from his colleagues, resenting the way his superiors have presented him the job as a fait accompli and abroad in a world where money is easy and respect is earned in brutally straightforward ways, DC Winter is in his element. Worryingly so...Concerns amongst his superiors that Winter may finally have had too much temptation put in his path are soon supplanted by two vicious murders. First a high-profile local property developer is shot, with clinical efficiency, in his own bed. A few days later a government minister, on a visit to the city, is assassinated by two helmeted motorcyclists while his car is stuck in a traffic jam. A fevered investigation begins with Winter's erstwhile boss, D/I Faraday, in charge. With clues hard to come by, the government panicking and the anti-terrorist branch circling Faraday is shoved off the case and left in charge just of the investigation into the property developer's murder.With more time on his hands Faraday is also tasked with keeping track of Winter and he soon discovers that Winter, the arch-conspirator, has been set up.As Winter begins to realize what his bosses had in mind for him and Faraday begins to put together the pieces of a heartbreaking story of personal and political betrayal that may well link the two murders, the story becomes a study of the desperate measures some people take when their friends and their society let them down. 

With the world in crisis and the Superpowers moving towards confrontation, a UK city is trying to maintain order during a nuclear emergency. Civil rights are suspended and Martin Goodman, a man with a violent secret is put in charge. But unknown to Goodman, he too is under scrutiny.