Crickets Books in Order

The Crickets books take Dietz's military science fiction instincts and drop them into an alien invasion story with a horror edge. The enemy here is the Prax, an insectoid species that has been on Earth far longer than anyone realized. When they finally stop hiding, the opening move is not subtle. People disappear, whole communities are wiped out, and the question stops being whether aliens are real and becomes how long humanity can last once they decide to feed.

That word matters. Feed.

The first book begins with CIA Special Operations officer Jim Carter, who arrives in Serene, Texas, to investigate a massacre and quickly learns the scale of the problem. Along the way he teams up with army officer and entomologist Anne Blake, which gives the story two useful angles at once. Carter brings the soldier and investigator side. Blake brings the science, the fieldwork, and the terrible realization that understanding the Prax may not be enough to stop them. Their partnership gives the series a human center even as the war expands far beyond one town.

By Crickets 2, the conflict is much bigger and much uglier. Billions are dead, large parts of the world have fallen, and the story opens out to include Marine Corps Captain Lester Evans and FEMA manager Cassie Lang. That shift tells you what kind of series this is. Dietz is not interested only in the first-contact shock. He wants the logistics, the collapse, the refugee pressure, the command decisions, and the hard grind of trying to save something when the damage is already enormous.

The tone sits somewhere between invasion thriller and military disaster novel. The books move quickly, but there is a strong sense that every victory is local and temporary. Human beings are good at fighting. The Prax are good at war too. That balance keeps the series tense, because nobody gets the comfort of feeling fully in control.

If you like alien invasion stories that start with investigation and widen into a full survival war, Crickets does that well. Expect action, field science, collapsing systems, and a lot of pressure on ordinary people who were not built for apocalypse but have to function inside one anyway.