Aaron Stander Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: Summer People → Color Tour → Deer Season
If you like winter cases and rough weather: Shelf Ice → Cruelest Month → The Center Cannot Hold
If you want Ray's earlier backstory: Medieval Murders → Summer People
If you want later, bigger cases: Destination Wedding → Smoke and Mirrors

Aaron Stander spent many years in the Detroit area, teaching college English and training writing teachers. In 2000, he and his wife left their teaching jobs and moved permanently to their cottage in northern Michigan. He later taught creative writing at Interlochen and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

He came to crime fiction later than most.

The turn was almost accidental. More than thirty years ago, Stander hurt his back while working on a vintage sports car and ended up sidelined for months. During that stretch, he was handed Elmore Leonard's Freaky Deaky, and the book opened a door. He tore through Leonard's work, then began thinking about the roads, woods, and shoreline he had known around rural Benzie and Leelanau counties when he was young.

Before that, he was not much of a recreational fiction reader. He was busy teaching writing and Shakespeare, and most of his own published work was academic. Crime novels gave him a new model, one that could be smart, direct, and deeply rooted in place. He began writing murder scenes first, then figured out the larger story afterward. Those early scenes turned into Summer People, his first Ray Elkins novel, which appeared in 2000. At first he had only a small batch of copies meant mostly for family and friends, but local booksellers quickly asked for more, and that surprise nudged him into a second career as a novelist.

The books that followed, including Color Tour, Deer Season, Shelf Ice, Murder in the Merlot, Destination Wedding, and Smoke and Mirrors, kept building the world around Sheriff Ray Elkins. Readers tend to come for the crimes, but they stay for the setting and the steady, patient way the investigations unfold. Stander likes beaches, orchards, vineyards, back roads, and small towns with long memories, and he uses all of them without making them feel like postcards.

His fiction keeps circling a few concerns. There is often tension between year round locals and wealthy seasonal residents. A present day murder usually turns out to be tied to something older, a buried grudge, a family secret, or a piece of local history that never really settled. Even when the plots get twisty, the books stay grounded in human motives, weather, and work.

Northern Michigan is not just scenery in his books.

It is the thing that pressures everybody. Snow closes roads. Water hides evidence. Summer crowds change the rhythm of a county. In the prequel Medieval Murders, he steps away from Cedar County to show a younger Ray Elkins at a university, but the same interest in character, institutions, and quiet fault lines is still there. Stander has also stayed closely tied to Michigan's writing community through stories, reviews, articles, and many years as the host and producer of Michigan Writers on the Air on Interlochen Public Radio.

These days he lives near Interlochen with his wife, in the woods and close to the water that shaped so much of his work. He spends a lot of time kayaking along Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, and that feel for weather and shoreline runs straight through the Ray Elkins books. Stander may have arrived at mystery writing by accident, but he built a lasting fictional county once he got there.