John Dunning Books In Order

John Dunning (website) is an American author best known for his Cliff Janeaway detective series. Interesting fact about the series – Cliff Janeway is a cop and a rare book expert located in Denver, Colorado.

The author himself owns a rare bookstore in East Denver, called the Old Algonquin Bookstore. Talk about walking the talk!

John Dunning was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 3, he moved with his family Charleston in South Carolina, his father’s hometown. He got a GED certificate from the state of Carolina in the early 1960s.

At the age of 22, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he started working various odd jobs. He admits that he was never very good in school, he left high school, he got kicked out of the army and could never hold a steady job. His inability to concentrate for long times on a job was eventually diagnosed as ADD.

He worked in a glass shop, then worked for various horse trainers on the race tracks, followed by landing a clerk boy job at the Denver Post in the library. Eventually, he worked his way up to become a copy boy and at some point became a journalist.

However, he didn’t stop there. Later on, he worked in politics and eventually opened his own bookstore with his wife Helen. And of course, he wrote books, which he got serious about in 1992 when his first novel, Booked To Die, also the first book in the Cliff Janeaway series, was published. He closed his bookstore in 1994, focusing thereafter on being an online bookseller and author.

In 2006 he had a brain surgery to remove a benign tumor, which also caused the loss of one eye. This sadly prevented the author from completing a new novel.

So here are the John Dunning books in order of publication, which consists of the Cliffe Janeaway series, 3 standalone detective novels, 2 general standalone novels and a few works of non-fiction. The series lists the reading order in brackets.

Cliff Janeaway Detective Series In Order

1. Booked to Die (Cliff Janeaway #1), published 1992

2. The Bookman’s Wake (Cliff Janeaway #2), published 1995

3. The Bookman’s Promise (Cliff Janeaway #3), published 2004

4. The Sign of the Book (Cliff Janeaway #4), published 2005

5. The Bookwoman’s Last Fling (Cliff Janeaway #5), published 2006

Standalone novels by John Dunning

The Holland Suggestions, published 1975 (detective novel)

Looking for the Ginger North, published 1980 (detective novel)

Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime, published 2001 (detective novel)

Denver, published 1980 (historical fiction)

Deadline, published 1981 (thriller)