British policing has a curious blind spot. It increasingly recognises that neurodivergent people may possess cognitive strengths well suited to police work: unusual powers of concentration, persistence, attention to detail and a tendency to see things from unexpected angles. But it still has no reliable idea how many neurodivergent officers it employs.
Police Scotland says that around one in ten people has a neurodivergent condition, and now actively encourages neurodivergent applicants to discuss the adjustments they might need during recruitment. Other forces have introduced similar schemes.
Yet national workforce statistics still don't tell us how many serving officers are autistic, or have ADHD, dyslexia or other forms of neurodivergence. In some forces the information simply isn't recorded. In others it depends on officers choosing to disclose it.
That reluctance to disclose may itself tell us something. A 2025 University of Leicester-led study, published in The Police Journal, interviewed a small group of neurodivergent police officers and staff from across the UK. Some expressed worries that disclosing a formal diagnosis might restrict their careers or affect promotion. But they also repeatedly described the advantages their different ways of thinking brought to police work: noticing things colleagues missed, remembering information, making unexpected connections and approaching problems from unconventional directions. One officer said: "I make a great detective because I'm autistic."
Another went further. Police forces, they argued, were "missing a trick" by failing to seek out neurodivergent recruits deliberately. Pair a neurodivergent officer with a neurotypical colleague and, in their words, "you'll have a dream team."
Detective fiction has always been fascinated by brilliant outliers: from Holmes and Poirot to Monk, Saga Norén, Lisbeth Salander and, more recently, neurodivergent detectives such as George Cross and Patience Evans. Their minds don’t simply work better than everyone else’s. They work differently. And many of the qualities associated with that difference are peculiarly useful to a detective: the ability to bracket emotional noise in favour of logical analysis, identify patterns and inconsistencies, retain unusual amounts of detail, sustain intense focus, resist conventional assumptions and stick with a line of inquiry long after others have given up.
Another recent example, BBC TV’s Ludwig, offers a new twist on the idea: a celebrated puzzle-setter with autistic traits who assumes the identity of his missing detective twin and discovers that his puzzle-solving mind is remarkably well suited to murder investigation. We’ve come a long way from wheeling in charlatan “psychic” consultants, and it’s exciting to imagine a future in which neurodivergent traits are increasingly understood as part of a particular cognitive profile, rather than simply a liability or disability.
This idea of a policing “dream team”—a formidable pairing of a neurotypical whose exceptionalism comes from a depth of experience, and a neurodivergent who sees and perceives the world differently—is the engine that powers my Lennox & Blackwood series.
Olivia Blackwood is the grenade I’ve lobbed into the white patriarchal monoculture of the Met: she’s queer, mixed race and has ADHD. I’ve tried to show how her neurodivergent traits both enhance her investigative instincts and make aspects of the job, and life around it, more difficult. As a senior officer sarcastically suggests in the first book, The Whispering Bones: ‘Is there anyone who doesn’t have ADHD, these days?’ Blackwood quickly bats this back: ‘Around ninety-five per cent of UK adults, sir. Although a fair chunk of them will be undiagnosed, high-functioning.’
Blackwood begins the series as a mid-thirties PC, but she’s mentored up to DC level by Oswald Lennox, a DCI in his early fifties. Lennox is a precise operator with a fearsome investigative reputation and is at first reluctant to work with such a messy, unfiltered character. But their methods dovetail, and after working the harrowing case at the centre of The Whispering Bones, they find common ground in a past tragedy that runs through the series. In the second novel, The Vanishing Room, that symbiosis deepens, and so do the stakes.
At the start of The Vanishing Room, Blackwood receives a commendation in front of her policing peers, and chooses the moment to state her neurodivergence, loud and proud, saying that she’s been called many things, including ‘difficult’, ‘hard work’ and ‘mental’, but raises her award to make the point that ‘being different doesn’t have to be a weakness. It can also be a strength… Here’s to the power of diversity. To difference!’
Meanwhile, Lennox is facing his own personal crisis: memory gaps, hand tremors, uncharacteristic lapses of judgement. As the tests point towards an unthinkable prognosis, he’s forced to adapt his own methods and hide his compromises in a way that resembles the social masking behaviour adopted by some neurodivergent people to help them navigate the neurotypical world.
The characters face a new central case in each book, and there’s also that shared tragedy running underneath: Blackwood's own unsolved mystery, the disappearance of her childhood best friend Abigail, more than a decade cold. It’s the one case Lennox couldn’t solve as a DI, and as Blackwood revisits the disappearance with her new-found police powers, both are drawn back into the darkness. Where the thread leads, and what it could cost each of them to keep pulling it, is where the series is heading.
I didn’t want to present ADHD and neurological difference as colour: a tic, a running joke, a superpower, a way of making a character quirky. Blackwood's brain is the reason she's good at the job. She scatters her attention wide enough to catch connections a more linear thinker would miss; she also can't face a spreadsheet without wanting to climb out of her own skin. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out.
So, this is Lennox and Blackwood: one detective whose difference is lifelong and increasingly claimed as a strength, another whose mind may be starting to fail him in ways he can't control or reverse. They're both just trying to keep functioning, and increasingly, they can only do it together.
If policing is beginning to recognise that neurological difference can be an investigative strength, then the question goes beyond how neurodivergent officers can be accommodated within an institution built around a neurological norm. It becomes a question of what policing might be missing when it expects everyone within that institution to think in broadly the same way.
Crime fiction worked this out a long time ago. The best detective in the room is often the one looking at the same evidence as everybody else and seeing something entirely different. It seems policing fact may finally be catching up with fiction.
A British crime thriller in which a child’s disappearance from a locked London home leads two mismatched detectives to a predator who's spent years perfecting his method. Police procedural partnership, abduction suspense and a duel of wills with a killer who's always one step ahead. Love Builds the Strongest Cages. A young boy has disappeared from his London home. No sign of forced entry. No witnesses. No trace. Just an empty house and parents crazed with fear. When the investigation is linked to a horrific discovery beneath a derelict Victorian mansion, DCI Oswald Lennox and DC Olivia Blackwood realise they're up against a methodical predator who's been perfecting his lethal craft for years. Every hour that passes brings the missing boy closer to an unthinkable fate. Lennox is struggling with lapses in memory and focus. Blackwood’s impulsive streak threatens to derail a career that's only getting started. As the pair close in, the killer makes his boldest move yet, turning the case into a battle of wills that neither detective can afford to lose. For some monsters, death isn't enough.
The Whispering Bones and The Vanishing Room, books 1 and 2 in the Lennox & Blackwood series, are out now, published by Vinci Books. The Holloway Screamer, book 3, is out in February 2027. A prequel novella, The Rising Silence, is available in October 2026.
