Maud O'Connor

About the Maud O'Connor series

After closing out Frieda Klein and writing four more standalone thrillers, Nicci French launched a new series in 2024 built around Detective Inspector Maud O'Connor, a more conventionally procedural creation than Frieda Klein: a working police officer chasing missing-persons cases and cold-case murders that keep reopening old wounds among ordinary families and old friend groups. Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? opens the series with a woman's disappearance decades earlier resurfacing through her now-adult children; The Last Days of Kira Mullan follows two underestimated women exposing a murder and the institutional failures around it; What Happened That Night (published in the US as Tyler Green Will Never Be Free) centers on a wrongly-imprisoned man confronting the friends he suspects let him take the fall decades earlier.

Each book is a self-contained case for O'Connor rather than a single unbroken arc like Frieda Klein, though O'Connor herself develops across the books -- this is Nicci French working in a more traditional detective-series mode after the sustained slow-burn of their previous series.