Who wrote the Death in Paradise books, and where should you start?
The sun, the sand, the improbably high murder rate of Saint Marie — it turns out the island's cases didn't stay on television. There's a whole shelf of Death in Paradise novels, and they come from the most qualified pen possible.
They're written by Robert Thorogood, the man who created the BBC series in the first place.
Thorogood wrote four Death in Paradise novels between 2015 and 2018, all starring DI Richard Poole — the original detective played by Ben Miller in series 1 and 2 of the show. Start with A Meditation on Murder (2015) and read in publication order; the books were written in sequence, so publication order and story order are the same thing.
The four books, in order
- A Meditation on Murder (2015) — spiritual guru Aslan Kennedy is stabbed inside a locked meditation room with only five other people present, one of whom has already confessed. Poole, hot and bothered as ever, doesn't buy it.
- The Killing of Polly Carter (2015) — a supermodel falls from the cliff outside her island home, and everyone insists she would never have jumped.
- Death Knocks Twice (2017) — Poole's third case on Saint Marie.
- Murder in the Caribbean (2018) — the fourth and, so far, final Poole novel. No new Death in Paradise book has been announced since.
Why the books star the original detective
Because that's the era Thorogood knows best. He created the show, wrote five episodes of its first series in 2011, and built the format around Poole — the sweating, tea-drinking Englishman allergic to paradise. The novels simply give Miller's detective the extra cases television never got round to.
Thorogood's route there was a long one: a Cambridge Footlights president in 1994, he once toured a Molière production alongside pre-fame David Mitchell, Robert Webb, and Olivia Colman, then spent years selling scripts that never got made before Death in Paradise landed.
What to read when you've finished
Thorogood didn't stop at Saint Marie. In 2021 he launched The Marlow Murder Club, a cosy mystery series about 77-year-old crossword-setter Judith Potts solving crimes in a Thames-side town. There are now five books, the latest being The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts, published in 2026 — and that series became a television show too. On screen, the Paradise universe also grew its own spin-offs, Beyond Paradise and Return to Paradise, if the books leave you wanting more island procedure.