Bob Mayer (Jennifer Crusie) Books in Order

The partnership between Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer started with a conversation at a writers’ conference and turned into a long-running experiment in two-author storytelling. She brings the snarky dialogue, complicated heroines, and found families; he brings military know-how, action beats, and an eye for tactics.

Their first joint novel, Don't Look Down, strands commercial director Lucy Armstrong on a troubled action-movie shoot in the Georgia swamps. Green Beret J.T. Wilder signs on as a stunt double and advisor, expecting an easy job, only to end up chasing arms dealers through helicopter stunts and real explosions. The romance grows out of mutual competence and very little patience for nonsense.

In Agnes and the Hitman a food writer who just wants to host a wedding at her dream house keeps finding intruders in her kitchen and bodies in her yard. Shane, the hitman sent to protect her, is dealing with his own mob family drama and a missing fortune. The result is equal parts screwball comedy and romantic suspense, spiked with recipes and shotgun blasts.

Wild Ride shifts into paranormal territory. Project manager Mab Brannigan is hired to refurbish Dreamland, a run-down amusement park, and discovers the rides double as cages for powerful demons. As she untangles the park’s magic and its secrets, she falls for a man who may not be entirely human, while the authors lean into spooky fun and gallows humor.

More recently, Crusie and Mayer have returned with two linked trilogies. The Liz Danger books follow a burned-out ghostwriter who comes home to Burney, Ohio, and keeps getting pulled into local corruption and murder alongside steady cop Vince Cooper. The Rocky Start novels move to a Smoky Mountains town full of retired operatives, where single mother Rose Malone and hiker Max Reddy keep tripping over assassins, missing money, and their own feelings.

Across all of these stories you can feel the push and pull of two distinct voices. Scenes of domestic chaos sit next to firefights, jokes land in the middle of stakeouts, and the love stories always have to survive gunshots, crooked politicians, or supernatural mayhem. Read in order, the collaborations trace how both writers stretch into new territory while keeping what their readers already love.