Steven F. Havill Books in Order

Steven F. Havill is an American author best known for his two related police procedural series set in the fictional Posadas County, New Mexico, the Bill Gastner mysteries and the Posadas County mysteries featuring Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman. He has also written the Dr. Thomas Parks historical mystery series, set in 1890s Pacific Northwest.

This page lists all Steven F. Havill books in order, including both Posadas County series, the Dr. Thomas Parks series, and his standalone western novels.

A printable book list is available below. You can print it or save it as a PDF.

Latest Steven F. Havill Books

Anthologies and Contributions

• Deadly Morsels, 2003 (includes the Bill Gastner novella Red or Green?, also listed above) Amazon

How Do the Bill Gastner and Posadas County Mysteries Fit Together?

The two series are really one long-running story set around the same sheriff’s department in the same community. However, in the first series, Bill Gastner is the main character. He grows older and as he moves towards retirement, Robert Torrez and Estelle Reyes-Guzman get bigger roles in the series, and eventually Estelle becomes the main character in her own related series.

In the series, the characters age normally as the years pass. Steven Havill said he prefers letting the series develop in real time, as he found it more interesting to follow a person’s from beginning to the end, and he didn’t want to keep the characters at roughly the same age from book to book. So that’s why we see in the books that everyone ages, the officers careers change and Estelle’s family and other characters also move through live at a normal pace.

However, when Estelle takes over as main character, Bill is still around, and he continues to appear in later books, but much less. The change is more of a gradual handover than an actual separate series starting with Estelle.

In Reverse, Estelle is working her final month as an undersheriff, and she is preparing to retire. But so far, neither Steven Havill or his publisher has announced that the Posadas County series is finished.

About Steven F. Havill

Steven F. Havill is an American author who wrote the Bill Gastner mystery series, the continuing Posadas County mystery series, the Dr. Thomas Parks historical series, and several standalone western novels. He has written more than 30 books since his debut western, The Killer, in 1981.

Steven F. Havill was born on June 22, 1945, in Penn Yan, New York, the son of Edward Havill, who was also a writer. He moved to Mexico and earned both his B.A. in 1969 and M.A. in 1982 from the University of New Mexico. After graduating from the university, he worked as a reporter and editor before becoming a high school biology and English teacher in Grants, New Mexico.

His first novel, The Killer, was published by Doubleday in 1981, and it was a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s Medicine Pipe Bearers Award for a first Western novel. The next three books were also westerns, published during the 1980s. Steven Havill has described all four as “medical westerns.” He was always interested in the history of medicine and deliberately gave doctors an important role in his books. For example, in The Killer, two con men pose as physicians in a town that desperately needs medical help, and The Worst Enemy is about a frontier doctor dealing with an anthrax outbreak as he pursues a killer.

The author later returned to his interest in medicine with the Dr. Thomas Parks series, where Parks is a real physician who practices frontier medicine and surgery in 1980s Washington, and the medical work is part of the mysteries he comes across in the series.

When westerns were no longer popular to read, his agent suggested he try to write mysteries instead. Heartshot, published in 1991, became the first Bill Gastner book, which introduced Posadas County, an imaginary border county in New Mexico. Initially, he didn’t intend to write a long series, but after writing Bitter Recoil, the second book in the series in publication order, he began to see the possibilities in continuing with Gastner and the other people in the sheriff’s department.

He knows firearms first-hand. He began shooting while he was young, later competed in shooting sports, and eventually studied gunsmithing at Trinidad State in Colorado, where he earned an AAS degree in the subject. His knowledge in firearms shows in the parts of the books where, during an investigation, firearms, machinery, and how to use guns were included.

Steven F. Havill lives in Datil, New Mexico, with his wife Kathleen, a writer and artist.

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