Apaches Books in Order

The Apaches books are hard, angry New York crime novels set in the early and mid 1980s, when fear, drugs, and street violence seem to be outrunning the system meant to contain them. The title refers to a renegade group of former cops who no longer believe normal procedure is enough. They still think like detectives, but they act like vigilantes, and that tension drives the whole series.

They are not interested in playing nice.

Apaches begins by pulling wounded ex-detective Boomer Frontierie back into the life he thought he had lost. Forced into retirement after being hurt in a drug bust, Boomer gets another shot at action when a twelve-year-old girl is brutally kidnapped. Around him is a band of former cops with names that sound half legendary and half street-made, men and women who know how ugly the city has become and are willing to answer ugliness with force.

These books do not offer polished heroes. The Apaches are damaged, furious, and deeply suspicious of the limits placed on official law enforcement. What makes them compelling is that their rage is tied to a recognizable moral frustration. They see predators slip through cracks, cases go cold, and bureaucracy slow everything down. So they build their own way of working, faster, rougher, and far less concerned with permission.

Chasers expands the world and turns the volume up. After a machine-gun massacre in a Manhattan restaurant, the surviving Apaches go after a Colombian drug cartel responsible for pushing huge amounts of cocaine into the city. The crew grows, too, with new members like Ash, Quincy, and even Buttercup, a retired police dog whose presence tells you something important about the series. For all the brutality, Carcaterra still likes an ensemble, and he likes giving that ensemble unusual skills and strong personalities.

The city is practically another member of the cast.

Carcaterra's New York here is loud, dangerous, and worn down, a place of precinct grudges, barroom loyalties, hidden routes, panicked neighborhoods, and crimes that leave scars on everyone they touch. The books move fast, but they are rooted in place. You can feel the crack-era pressure in them, the sense that people are improvising just to keep up with the damage.

Across both novels, the larger themes stay steady, loyalty among broken people, the blurred line between justice and vengeance, and the question of what happens when good cops decide the rules are helping the wrong side. If you want careful procedural detail and clean institutional order, this is probably not the series. If you want bruising vigilante crime fiction with a strong street pulse and a team of ex-cops fighting a private war, Apaches is the one.