Bo Thunboe Books in Order

If you want the full Jake Houser story: What Must Be Done → What Can't Be True → However Many More → As It Never Was → Past Made Present
If you want the first full novel: What Can't Be True → However Many More → As It Never Was → Past Made Present
If you like cold cases and buried secrets: As It Never Was → Past Made Present
If you want a quick feel for Jake Houser: What Must Be Done → What Can't Be True

Bo Thunboe grew up in Naperville, in Chicago's western suburbs, and he still lives in that part of Illinois today. That local knowledge runs through his fiction. He writes crime novels set in familiar suburban territory, and thrillers that start with ordinary people having very bad days.

His path to writing was not tidy. He once hoped to fly helicopters for the Marines, but bad eyesight ended that plan before it could really begin. He went to college, drifted away from it, and spent a stretch of early adult life doing hard, practical jobs, including laying bricks and repossessing cars.

That winding start shows up on the page.

After meeting his wife, Diane, Thunboe reset things. He went back to school, earned a BA in economics and then a law degree from Northern Illinois University, and spent a couple of decades working as an attorney. Later he left law and turned to writing full time. That legal background matters, but not in a showy way. His books tend to care about how systems really work, who gets protected, and what happens when official procedure is too slow or too compromised to deliver anything that feels like justice.

His best-known work is the Jake Houser mystery series. It starts with What Can't Be True, where the discovery of human remains leads Detective Jake Houser into a case tangled up with family ties and local power. However Many More begins with the murder of one of Jake's oldest friends and opens into hidden silver, hidden motives, and more trouble than the victim first seemed to carry.

The later books keep widening the picture. As It Never Was turns an old disappearance into a tense search for the truth, while Past Made Present connects a missing teen to crimes from decades earlier. There is also a prequel, What Must Be Done, which gives a compact look at Jake under pressure when a girl vanishes and the clock is already running out.

Jake is the kind of detective Thunboe seems especially interested in: stubborn, skeptical, not much impressed by bureaucracy, and willing to keep pushing when everyone around him would rather let a case cool off. The appeal of these books is not just the twists. It is the way pressure builds around a character who knows the system, sees its blind spots, and still has to decide how far he can go.

He also writes beyond mystery. EMP Strike follows attorney Dan Fallon and his family after an electromagnetic pulse wipes out modern life and strands them apart. On paper that is a long way from a suburban detective story, but the core interest is similar. Thunboe likes writing about regular people facing severe strain and trying to hold onto themselves while the world stops playing fair.

Pressure is his subject.

He keeps returning to loyalty, survival, buried secrets, and the cost of doing the right thing late. His suburban settings feel lived in rather than dressed up, which makes even the larger plots feel close to home. If you like mysteries with grit, or thrillers that put everyday characters under real stress, his books are easy to settle into and hard to shrug off.