Wilderness areas book series in reading order

by Paul Doiron

by Jane Harper

Paul Doiron is the author of the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels. Subjects attached to the books include game wardens, wilderness areas, Maine, missing persons and murder. The catalogue holds 26 books between 1998 and 2026; the earliest listed title is Eating Between The Lines (1998), and The Poacher's Son (2010), Trespasser (2011), Bad Little Falls (2012) and Massacre Pond (2013) follow. Storm Tide (2026) is the newest entry.

Edward Abbey

27 books

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was an American novelist and essayist known for advocacy on environmental issues, criticism of public land policies and anarchist politics. His best known books are the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the nonfiction Desert Solitaire (1968). The catalogue holds 27 titles from Jonathan Troy (1954) to Postcards from Ed (2006), with the deserts and wilderness of the southwestern states recurring throughout.

Carla Neggers writes romance and romantic suspense, with 83 books in the catalogue published from 1982 to 2019. Dream Images (1982) is the earliest, followed by Midsummer Dreams (1982), Tangled Promises (1982) and Dancing Season (1983). Rival's Break (2019) is the newest title, and the catalogue is likely complete. Neggers series include Sharpe & Donovan, Swift River Valley, Cold Ridge/U.S. Marshals, Black Falls, Boston Police/FBI and Texas Rangers/Carriage House. Subjects include contemporary romance, missing persons, murder investigations and the FBI.

Christine Carbo writes mystery set in the Montana wilderness. The Glacier Park Mystery series opens with The Wild Inside (2015) and runs through Mortal Fall (2016), The Weight of Night (2017) and A Sharp Solitude (2018). Government investigators and police work murders, cold cases, missing persons and forest fires across wilderness areas administered by the Department of the Interior. A fifth book, The Confession Artist, is dated 2026, at a median 400 pages.

Rick Bass

32 books

Rick Bass is an American writer and environmental activist who trained as a geologist and worked in oil and gas before turning to writing and teaching. Wilderness, Montana and wildlife conservation run through the catalogue, from The Deer Pasture (1985) and Wild To The Heart (1988) to The Lost Grizzlies (1995) and The New Wolves (1998), both on wildlife reintroduction. Bass also writes fiction and short stories, among them Platte River (1994) and Where the Sea Used to Be (1998), and dog books such as Colter (2000). His 32 catalogued titles reach Wrecking Ball (2025), and he teaches in the Stonecoast MFA programme in Maine.

James Patterson

510 books• 73 series

James Patterson, born on March 22, 1947, is an American writer whose catalogue here holds 514 books published from 1976 to 2027. The run opens with The Thomas Berryman Number (1976), and Along Came a Spider (1992) and Kiss the Girls (1995) follow later. Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, Witch & Wizard, NYPD Red, Private, Middle School and the Women's Murder Club are among the Patterson series, alongside standalone thrillers, non-fiction and romance. Marshall Karp shares the credit on 5 of the books. Patterson's sales exceed 425 million copies, and Patterson was the first person to sell one million e-books. Forbes ranked Patterson the highest-paid author in 2016, for a third year running, and the National Book Foundation gave Patterson the Literarian Award in November 2015. 27 Stars is scheduled for 2027.

Greg Iles

19 books• 4 series

Suspense set largely in Mississippi is Greg Iles's territory, above all in the Penn Cage novels, which take a lawyer through buried family secrets and murder. Iles's 19 catalogued books open with Spandau Phoenix (1993) and close with Cemetery Road (2019), taking in the Penn Cage and Mississippi sequences and a set of standalone thrillers. The catalogue is listed as likely complete.

Kelley Armstrong, born 14 December 1968, is a Canadian writer working mainly in fantasy since 2001. Thirty-one fantasy novels carry the Armstrong name, thirteen of them in Women of the Otherworld, five in Cainsville, six in the Rockton books, and three each in Darkest Powers, Darkness Rising and Age of Legends. Armstrong also wrote the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy, three standalone teen thrillers, and the middle-grade Blackwell Pages trilogy with Melissa Marr. The catalogue runs to 177 titles, from Bitten (2001) to Last Resort at Haven's Rock, scheduled for 2027, with subjects including werewolves, witches, vampires and the supernatural.

Sara Donati writes historical fiction about frontier and pioneer life. The Wilderness sequence opens with Into the Wilderness (1998) and continues through Dawn on a Distant Shore (2000), Lake in the Clouds (2002), Fire Along the Sky (2004) and Queen of Swords (2006); a Waverly Place line follows. Twelve catalogued books reach The Sweet Blue Distance (2024), the earliest of them published as Rosina Lippi. The books are long, at a median of 650 pages, and Mohawk characters and women pioneers recur.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Jack London

156 books• 2 series

Jack London (January 12, 1876 to November 22, 1916), born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. London helped pioneer commercial fiction and the American magazine, and became one of the first American writers to win international celebrity and a large fortune from writing. A member of the radical San Francisco literary group "The Crowd", London campaigned for animal welfare, workers' rights and socialism. Those causes shaped The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel, and The People of the Abyss, a non-fiction exposé, as well as War of the Classes and Before Adam. The catalogue lists 156 titles from The Wisdom Of The Trail (1899), including The Son of the Wolf (1900) and Children of the Frost (1902).

Ranchers, frontier life and women pioneers recur in the subjects of Joan Johnston's books, which cover historical, western and contemporary romance. Johnston, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, is an American romance author. The catalogue lists 68 Johnston books between A Loving Defiance (1985) and Winter Magic (2020), and the run is marked as likely complete. Series include Hawk's Way, Bitter Creek, Benedict Brothers, Captive Hearts, Sisters of the Lone Star and Frontier Brides.

John Angus McPhee, born on 8 March 1931, is an American writer regarded as a pioneer of creative nonfiction. McPhee was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction four times and won in 1999 for Annals of the Former World, a collection of five books. The George Polk Career Award followed in 2008, and McPhee has held the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University since 1974. The catalogue lists 45 McPhee books, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to They're in the River (2025), including Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1967) and Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Subjects include geology, essays and travel.

James Oliver Curwood

45 books• 2 series

James Oliver Curwood (June 12, 1878 - August 13, 1927) was an American action-adventure writer and conservationist. Curwood set many books in the Hudson Bay region, the Yukon or Alaska, and Publishers Weekly placed them among the top-ten US best sellers in the early and mid 1920s. At least 180 films draw on Curwood's novels and short stories. At death, Curwood was the world's highest-paid author per word. The catalogue holds 45 titles, beginning with The Wolf Hunters and The Courage of Captain Plum in 1908, and includes the Kazan and Baree series. Subjects include wolves, dogs, bears, mounted police and gold mining in Canada.

John Barnes writes science fiction, much of it hard science fiction, with thriller and time-travel plots alongside. Series include Century Next Door, the Giraut books built on Giraut Leones, Timeline Wars, Timeraider, Jak Jinnaka and Daybreak. The catalogue lists 42 books from The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky (1986) to Raise the Gipper! (2012), taking in Orbital Resonance (1991), A Million Open Doors (1992), Mother of Storms (1994) and Kaleidoscope Century (1995). The 1990s were the heaviest decade.

William W. Forgey writes on wilderness medicine and outdoor first aid. Forgey's Wilderness Medicine (1979) opens a catalogue of 18 books that reaches The Prepper's Guide to Surviving Pandemics, Bioterrorism, and Infectious Disease in 2021. Hypothermia, medical emergencies, wilderness survival, travel and the treatment of mountaineering and backpacking injuries are the recorded subjects. The books are short, with a median of 106 pages, and the 1990s hold the densest run of titles.

Henry Kisor is the author of the Steve Martinez series, and the catalogue holds 12 books from What's That Pig Outdoors? (1990) to Traveling with Service Animals (2019). Subject headings include mystery and detective fiction, sheriffs, Lakota Indians, deafness, wilderness areas, bear attacks and murder for hire, and biography is also tagged. Zephyr (1994), Season's Revenge (2003), A Venture into Murder (2005), Cache of Corpses (2007) and Hang Fire (2013) are among the titles.

Peter Stark writes travel, wilderness and history. Eight catalogued books run from Driving to Greenland (1997) to The Lost Cities of El Norte (2026), including Last Breath (2001), At the Mercy of the River (2005), The Last Empty Places (2010), Astoria (2014), Young Washington (2018) and Gallop Toward the Sun (2023). Subject headings cover description and travel, wilderness areas, winter sports, skiers, biography, geography and local history. Stark is still publishing.