David Chill Books in Order

If you want the full Burnside story: Post Pattern → Fade Route → Bubble Screen
If you want a strong mid-series run: Double Pass → Tampa Two → Flea Flicker
If you prefer later cases with family and political stakes: Hard Count → Jet Sweep → Bull Rush
If you want a standalone thriller: Curse Of The Afflicted

David Chill grew up in New York City, then headed west for school, earning his undergraduate degree at SUNY-Oswego and a master's degree at USC. Los Angeles ended up mattering twice, as the place he built his adult life and the place that would later shape almost all of his fiction.

That move west stuck.

Before publishing novels, Chill spent years working in marketing research. He has said that he wrote surveys, ran focus groups, and presented findings to big corporate clients. He also got good at taking large piles of information and boiling them down into something clear enough for other people to use. That may sound far from private eyes and murder cases, but the overlap is easy to see. Good mysteries need observation, patience, and a feel for the telling detail.

Writing was not a straight line for him. He had written earlier, but 2012 became a turning point. After a Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis, and the loss of a longtime job, he leaned harder into storytelling. In 2013 he published Post Pattern, the first Burnside novel. It brought him early recognition from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the strong reader response helped turn a fresh start into a long-running series.

Burnside was a good place to start.

The character is a former USC football player and former LAPD officer turned Los Angeles private investigator, which lets Chill mix sports, policing, money, and old grudges in a very natural way. Books like Bubble Screen, Safety Valve, and Hard Count move easily between college football culture, business scandal, local politics, and family trouble. Later entries such as Jet Sweep and Bull Rush keep widening that world while holding onto the dry humor and steady casework at the center.

Los Angeles is more than scenery in these books. Chill has spoken about the city's mix of wealth, beauty, poverty, and disappointment, and that tension runs through the Burnside stories. They move from fancy neighborhoods to rougher corners, from football offices to crime scenes, and from private grief to public mess. He has also said that his recurring interest in siblings and family strain is linked to the death of his brother in a car accident at 24.

He did step away from Burnside once.

With Curse Of The Afflicted, Chill turned to political and medical suspense, following a pollster hit by both a cancer diagnosis and an assassination plot. That book feels personal in a different way. Chill later wrote openly about his own illness, and even in his fiction he seems drawn to people under pressure, people forced to think clearly while their lives are coming apart.

He still lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. The series has now stretched across more than a decade of writing, and that long relationship with the city, along with his experience of work, illness, family life, and reinvention, gives his books a grounded feel. They have the snap of classic private eye fiction, but also a quieter thread underneath them, about how people recover, adapt, and keep going.