Detective Inspector Bob Willis · #1
Deceived By The Light
An innocent man framed. A case closed. A serial killer free to kill again.
It is 1985. Detective Inspector Mungo ‘Bob’ Willis is being forced out of Avon and Somerset Police on medical grounds. His career is in tatters, his body broken, his mind shattered, and his partner—DS Lizzie Harper—dead in a sting operation gone wrong.
Their last case is closed, but Bob is convinced an innocent man has been framed, leaving a serial killer cruising the A303 with impunity, free to target lone women who have broken down by the roadside late at night.
The killer knows the police aren’t looking for anyone else in connection with the murders. What they don’t know is what Bob will do next.
And when another woman is killed in horrifyingly similar circumstances, Bob launches his own—unofficial—investigation. Can he stop a sadistic killer before they kill again? And again…
The series
The DI Bob Willis series steps back into the uneasy shadows of mid-1980s England, where justice feels fragile and the truth is often buried beneath official reports. At its heart is Mungo “Bob” Willis, a detective inspector forced off the front line by injury and haunted by the death of his partner. Broken in body and shaken in mind, he is a man the police hierarchy would rather forget, yet he refuses to let go when the system moves on too quickly, especially when innocent lives are at stake.
Read full series description
The stories unfold against a backdrop of roadside lay-bys, smoky pubs, and towns still adjusting to a changing Britain. Technology is limited, leads vanish into dead ends, and every breakthrough depends on instinct, legwork, and the dogged persistence of a detective who refuses to let silence settle over the guilty. Told in an intimate, often raw first-person voice, the novels pull readers directly into Bob’s fractured thoughts, where doubt and determination collide.
What makes this series resonate is not only the suspense of unsolved murders and long-buried crimes, but also the portrait of a man wrestling with his own failures while pursuing truths others have chosen to ignore. The tension builds from the small details, a radio crackling in the night, the lonely hum of the A303, a case file too neatly closed, reminders that danger lingers in the most ordinary settings.
For readers who value crime fiction with atmosphere as sharp as its puzzles, these books deliver both: gritty police procedurals grounded in a vivid sense of time and place, and a protagonist whose scars make his fight for justice feel all the more human.
Be the first reviewer
Sign in and write the first reader review.
