Columbia River Books in Order

The Columbia River novels act as a hub for Kendra Elliot’s Oregon universe. Rather than following just one protagonist, the series rotates through several characters readers have already met—FBI agents, local detectives, search-and-rescue specialists—tying their lives together with new, often high-profile cases along the Columbia River and across central Oregon.

The Last Sister opens the sequence with FBI agent Zander Wells investigating a double murder in a logging town, only to uncover connections to the long-ago hanging of Emily Mills’s father and the disappearance of her older sister. The Silence brings back Ava McLane and Mason Callahan from the Callahan & McLane books, pitting them against a conspiracy theorist’s murder that spirals into a deadly plot targeting law enforcement. In In the Pines, Mercy Kilpatrick and Truman Daly find their quiet Eagle’s Nest community overrun by treasure hunters—and a murder linked to a decades-old missing-persons case.

The later books widen the scope without losing the personal thread. The First Death shines a light on search-and-rescue handler Rowan Wolff, whose childhood abduction resurfaces when a new serial killer mimics the crime that shaped her life. At the River pulls Mercy and Truman back to the site of an infamous camping-trip disappearance after a true-crime podcaster is killed in the same place, suggesting that the original case was never fully solved. The Next Grave reunites Rowan and Detective Evan Bolton as they investigate the murder of Evan’s retired mentor and the sudden vanishing of the man’s family, uncovering old cases someone in power is desperate to keep buried.

The common threads are the rivers and forests of Oregon, a web of law-enforcement relationships, and crimes that echo across years rather than days.

You don’t have to read every one of Elliot’s earlier series to enjoy Columbia River, but doing so adds depth, since many “new” leads here started as side characters elsewhere. The tone leans a bit more procedural and a shade darker than some of the novellas, with complex investigations, forensics, and the emotional cost of revisiting past trauma. For readers who like seeing a connected world evolve over time, Columbia River is the spine that holds everything together.