Allen Eskens Books in Order

Allen Eskens is an American crime writer and former criminal attorney who practiced law in Minnesota for 25 years. He published his first novel, The Life We Bury, in 2014, introducing Joe Talbert, detective Max Rupert, law professor Boady Sanden and Lila Nash. His books won the Barry Award, Minnesota Book Award, Left Coast Crime Award, and Silver Falchion Award.

He groups most of the novels by character, with Joe, Max, Boady or Lila taking the lead in various books, so the characters keep turning up in one another’s books. That overlap is also why his books are sometimes divided into several separate series elsewhere even though Eskens doesn’t number them that way himself.

If you plan to read several of the connected novels, publication order is the easiest way to follow the characters as they reappear. The bibliography below lists each book once and explains how the different character stories fit together.

Upcoming Allen Eskens Books

• The Loyal Daughter – February 16, 2027

Allen Eskens Books in Publication Order

1. The Life We Bury, 2014
2. The Guise of Another, 2015
3. The Heavens May Fall, 2016
4. The Deep Dark Descending, 2017
5. The Shadows We Hide, 2018
6. Nothing More Dangerous, 2019
7. The Stolen Hours, 2021
8. Forsaken Country, 2022
9. Saving Emma, 2023
10. The Quiet Librarian, 2025 (standalone novel)
11. The Loyal Daughter, 2027

Reading notes:

• Nothing More Dangerous takes place in 1976 when Boady Sanden was 15 years old, so it’s a prequel to Boady’s story.
• The Quiet Librarian is the exception to these connections between characters. Hana Babić’s novel is a standalone.

Allen Eskens books reviewed on Mystery Sequels:

• The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
• The Guise of Another by Allen Eskens

How Allen Eskens’ Books Connect

The same novel can belong to more than one character’s story. These overlapping arcs explain why Eskens’s books are sometimes included in different series even though he does not describe them that way himself.

Joe Talbert

Joe is the main character in The Life We Bury, which also starts the shared universe. A college assignment sends him looking into the conviction of dying prisoner Carl Iverson. He is again the main character in The Shadows We Hide. He now works as a reporter investigating the murder of a man who may have been his father.

Joe also appears in The Stolen Hours, but Lila Nash is the main character there. It makes more sense to read that book as a continuation of their shared world than as Joe Talbert #3.

Max Rupert

Minneapolis detective Max Rupert is introduced in The Life We Bury as well, but his own story takes over during the next few books.

The Guise of Another, the second book published, actually begins with Max’s brother Alexander, a detective under investigation for corruption. Max becomes more important as Alexander’s case falls apart around him. The Heavens May Fall finds Max still struggling with his wife Jenni’s death while he is also busy investigating another murder. In The Deep Dark Descending, he learns what really happened to Jenni and hunts for the people responsible. These books, beginning with The Guise of Another, are one progression in Max’s story.

Forsaken Country returns to Max after he has left Minneapolis homicide and withdrawn to a cabin in northern Minnesota. It is not an unrelated standalone novel but a continuation of what happened in the earlier Max books.

Boady Sanden

Boady Sanden is the missing piece in many Eskens reading-order lists.

We first meet the adult Boady in The Life We Bury. In The Heavens May Fall, he returns to courtroom work and represents a man Max Rupert believes committed murder, which puts a strain on their friendship.

Nothing More Dangerous goes back to Missouri in 1976 and follows Boady at fifteen. It can be read separately from the whole series, so if you want to follow Boady specifically, you can start here before meeting him as an adult in The Life We Bury. His story then continues in The Heavens May Fall and Saving Emma. None of the following storylines will be spoiled by starting with Boady’s prequel.

Saving Emma returns to the adult Boady and picks up several years after The Heavens May Fall. Ben Pruitt’s daughter Emma is now living with Boady and his wife Dee, while Boady works with the Innocence Project.

Lila Nash

Lila first appears as Joe Talbert’s neighbour in The Life We Bury. She later becomes Boady Sanden’s law student in The Heavens May Fall and remains part of Joe’s life in The Shadows We Hide.

She finally becomes the main lead in The Stolen Hours. By then Lila has finished law school and is now working toward a job as a prosecutor in Hennepin County.

So The Stolen Hours is not really the first and only book in a separate Lila Nash series, but she gets here her own case after appearing in the books since since The Life We Bury.

Niki Vang

Detective Niki Vang has been part of Eskens’s Minneapolis police world for years. She is Max Rupert’s partner in The Heavens May Fall and The Deep Dark Descending, investigates with Lila in The Stolen Hours, and helps Max again in Forsaken Country.

With The Loyal Daughter, Niki becomes the lead character herself.

About Allen Eskens

Allen Eskens grew up in the hills of central Missouri, and becoming a novelist was not something he was thinking about during his school years. He has described himself as a poor student who became interested in theater long before he took his studies seriously. One early exception was a high-school English assignment where he wrote an unpublished short story called The Last Horizon that was twice as long as his assignment. He turned it in late, still received an A, and his teacher asked whether he had ever considered becoming a writer.

He eventually earned a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota and then a law degree from Hamline University. After law school, he continued his studies. He completed the the MFA program at Minnesota State University-Mankato, the Loft Literary Center and the Iowa Summer Writer’s Festival. After he ended his studies, he worked as a criminal law in Minnesota for 25 years. Allen Eskens has said that working as a defense lawyer taught him to pull apart the facts of a case and look for weaknesses in the story being presented. This was a habit that he kept when plotting his crime novels.

While working as a lawyer, writing remained something he continued doing for himself for a long time. In 1991 he began a short story about a fifteen-year-old Missouri boy named Boady Sanden. The story kept growing, and Eskens kept returning to it while studying the art of writing. He put it aside while learning and writing, and twenty-eight years later, it finally appeared as Nothing More Dangerous, which would eventually become the Boady Sanden prequel.

However, Boady’s story wasn’t the manuscript that made him a published novelist. After writing privately for about twenty years, Allen Eskens decided to get The Life We Bury to a traditional publishing house. He has mentioned sending it to 150 agents and receiving 150 rejections before the 151st agreed to represent him. Finally, the novel was published in 2014.

The Life We Bury won the Rosebud Award for Best Debut Mystery, the Barry Award for Best Paperback Original and a Silver Falchion Award, while also reaching the finals of the Edgar, Anthony, Thriller and Minnesota Book Awards. Allen Eskens later won the Minnesota Book Award for The Heavens May Fall and a second Barry Award for The Deep Dark Descending.

His books have now been translated into 23 languages. Allen Eskens has retired from criminal law after 25 years in practice, while he continued writing books, from the early interconnected Minnesota characters to the Missouri childhood story in Nothing More Dangerous, the Bosnia and Minnesota story of The Quiet Librarian, and Niki Vang’s lead role in the upcoming The Loyal Daughter.

Major Awards and Honors

• The Life We Bury – Left Coast Crime Rosebud Award, Best Debut Mystery (2015)
• The Life We Bury – Barry Award, Best Paperback Original (2015)
• The Life We Bury – Silver Falchion Award, Best First Novel: Traditional (2015)
• The Heavens May Fall – Minnesota Book Award, Genre Fiction (2017)
• The Deep Dark Descending – Barry Award, Best Paperback Original (2018)

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