David Raker

David Raker is the missing persons investigator protagonist of Tim Weaver's David Raker series — a former journalist who turned to finding missing people after his wife disappeared, and who now specializes in cases where the official investigation has stalled and the families have nowhere else to turn. Raker's personal history gives him both a particular emotional investment in the work and a specific kind of damage that accumulates across the series.

Weaver writes psychological thrillers with genuine craft — the mysteries of why people disappear and what they leave behind are constructed with careful plotting, and Raker's investigations consistently reveal the hidden lives beneath the surfaces of ordinary-seeming existence. The series is set primarily in London and its surroundings, rendered with atmospheric specificity.

The David Raker series has won Weaver a large and devoted readership in British crime fiction, with his plotting sophistication and his character's emotional depth distinguishing the books from the crowded field of British psychological thrillers. The personal cost to Raker across the series — the people he loses, the damage he accumulates — gives the books genuine weight.

Begin with Vanished and read in publication order.