Bad Bill Books in Order

Bad Bill is a smaller David Putnam series, but it carries a big mood. The book at its center, Fire at Will, follows veteran sheriff's deputy Will Donnelly after a choice that should probably end his career. He steals drug money, gives it to charity in memory of his late wife, and gets shipped out to the Mojave as punishment. That setup tells you a lot about Will right away. He is grieving, stubborn, half self-destructive, and still trying to do some kind of good even when it costs him.

The desert is its own villain.

Most of the story unfolds around Joshua Tree and the hard empty spaces nearby, and that setting matters. Heat, distance, and silence all work on Will's mind. He is dealing with post-traumatic stress after his wife's death, and the desert starts to feel slippery, almost unreal. Putnam leans into mirages, isolation, and the sense that a bad decision can echo for miles when there is no city noise to drown it out.

Will is not alone, exactly. He is haunted by a woman he calls Toots, who looks a lot like his dead wife and is visible only to him. Whether you read her as grief, guilt, instinct, or something stranger, she gives the book a different texture from Putnam's more straightforward police thrillers. Toots comments, pushes, and nudges. She can be funny, annoying, and unsettling all at once. That means the series sits in an interesting spot between procedural crime fiction and something more feverish.

The case driving Fire at Will is grounded enough to keep the story anchored. Will ends up under a crooked captain while focusing on a suspected child abductor who slipped past the system before. That gives the book a familiar Putnam concern, children in danger and official systems that fall short, but the route to justice is much less clean than it sounds. Will is compromised before the investigation even starts, and the people around him are not especially trustworthy either.

This is not a comfort read, and it is not meant to be.

What makes Bad Bill stand out is the mix of hard police detail and damaged perception. Will knows the job. He also knows how easy it is to lie to yourself when you are exhausted, grieving, and angry. So the tension is not just about whether he can catch the right person. It is also about whether he can trust what he sees, whether he can survive his own impulses, and whether doing the right thing is even possible in a place this dry and morally bent.

If you want Putnam at his dustiest and strangest, this is the series to try. Even with only one book so far, Bad Bill has a clear identity. It is desert noir with grief in its bones, a haunted deputy at the wheel, and a story that keeps asking how far a broken person can go before the line between justice and obsession disappears.