Dana Cutler Books in Order

Dana Cutler’s books track a tough, independent private investigator who keeps getting pulled into matters far bigger than routine surveillance. Based on the East Coast but often crossing paths with Oregon lawyers and judges, she works cases that climb quickly from missing persons to the highest levels of government.

In Executive Privilege Dana is hired to follow a college student in Washington, D.C., on what sounds like an easy job. Instead she watches the young woman slip into a secret meeting with the President of the United States. By morning the student is dead and tentatively linked to a serial killer nicknamed the D.C. Ripper. Dana’s instincts tell her the official story is wrong. At the same time, a junior lawyer in Oregon, Brad Miller, is handling the appeal of a convicted killer who swears he was framed to protect a powerful politician. When Dana and Brad compare notes, they uncover a chain of blackmail, cover ups, and contract killings that point straight at the Oval Office.

Supreme Justice widens the lens to the country’s highest court. A woman on Oregon’s death row is appealing her conviction for killing her lover, a man with deep ties to a shadowy intelligence operation. As a vacancy opens on the Supreme Court, someone inside that same world is willing to kill to keep the case from being heard. Dana is brought in quietly after a justice is attacked and another steps down under mysterious circumstances. Her digging into an old freighter shootout, a vanished witness, and a buried drugs case puts her on a collision course with people who have spent years manipulating national security from the shadows.

In Capitol Murder the past comes roaring back. Clarence Little, the serial killer whose appeal Brad once handled, escapes from death row in Oregon. Brad, now working in Washington for a powerful senator, starts receiving threats. A body is found in the senator’s Georgetown home, killed in Clarence’s signature way, and the senator disappears. While Dana searches Oregon for the truth about the politician’s history, a terrorist cell is preparing to attack a packed professional football stadium. The plot threads twist together in the halls of Congress, where personal secrets and public duty clash.

Sleight of Hand brings Dana into a different kind of high stakes case. Hired to track a jewel encrusted scepter with a murky history, she chases leads from the Pacific Northwest back to Virginia. At the center of the storm is Charles Benedict, a charismatic criminal defense lawyer, expert magician, and contract killer who delights in using his courtroom skills and sleight of hand to orchestrate crimes. When Benedict appears to frame a wealthy businessman for his wife’s disappearance, Dana realizes she is hunting a man who treats murder like a performance.

What ties the Dana Cutler series together is the way it blends private eye work with political thriller energy. Dana spends as much time dodging federal agents, hired guns, and intelligence operatives as she does interviewing witnesses. Readers get shifting views of the justice system, from small town courts to the Supreme Court and the Senate. Through it all Dana remains the constant: wary of authority, stubborn about the truth, and willing to risk her own safety when she decides a story the public has been told does not match the facts on the ground.