Arthur Case Wu Books in Order

The Arthur Case Wu books are Ross Thomas in a slightly looser, more playful mode, but they still run on danger, money, and hidden agendas. At the center are Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, two smart operators who are not easy to pin down. They are part investigators, part fixers, part adventurers, and part something less respectable. They take on problems that look odd at first and then turn out to involve very serious people.

That mix is the whole point.

The series starts with Chinaman's Chance, continues in Out on the Rim, and closes with Voodoo, Ltd.. These books are connected by character more than by one strict ongoing plot, so each one has room to roam. Ross Thomas uses that freedom well. Buried money, missing people, political freelancing, murder, blackmail, and old intelligence-world ties all get folded into the action. The stories move across California, Washington, the Philippines, and Los Angeles money country without ever losing their cool, amused tone.

Artie Wu is one of Thomas's great creations, calm, sly, and capable of sounding almost casual while sizing up a room faster than anybody else in it. Quincy Durant is a perfect counterweight, equally experienced, equally wary, and just as hard to fool. Around them grows a wider circle of allies and specialists, including Maurice Otherguy Overby, Booth Stallings, and Georgia Blue. By the time you get to the later books, the series starts to feel like a very expensive private solution to very expensive problems.

That is especially true in Voodoo, Ltd., where the team works something close to a custom-built problem-solving outfit. But even before that, the books have the same basic pleasure: people with complicated pasts, dropped into a job that nobody honest would quite accept, trying to stay one step ahead of the double-cross that is surely coming. The plots are twisty, but the real hook is the company. These are books you read as much to spend time with the crew as to find out who set what in motion.

The tone matters too. The Arthur Case Wu novels can be funny, but never in a goofy way. They are elegant capers with a political aftertaste. Thomas likes oddball setups, but he always grounds them in self-interest, old loyalties, and the way power travels through money and reputation. That keeps the books from floating off into pure farce. No matter how strange the opening sounds, the stakes end up real.

If the Mac McCorkle books are Ross Thomas's classic barroom espionage novels, the Wu books are the wider-angle version, roomier, more ensemble-driven, and a little more eccentric. They still have the clipped dialogue and hard-earned worldliness Thomas does so well. They just give him more room to wander, and he uses it to build one of his most entertaining recurring teams.