David K Wilson Books in Order

David K. Wilson grew up in Lindale, a small town in East Texas. The people and places he knew there helped shape the offbeat communities, sharp talkers, and messy secrets that later found their way into his fiction.

He was writing long before publishing a novel. Wilson has recalled making up stories as a child, including one written in crayon during first or second grade. After college, he moved to Chicago, where he worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director.

The route to novels was hardly direct.

While working in advertising during the day, Wilson wrote screenplays at night. He later moved to upstate New York, kept working on scripts, and saw several produced. His screenwriting work includes the family film Spirit Riders, along with horror projects.

Screenwriting taught him how much a story can change once it passes through directors, actors, budgets, and production. Ghostwriting gave him another side of the business. He worked with other authors on psychological thrillers, then found he wanted to build a fictional world that was fully his own.

That led to Combustible in 2019, the first Sam Lawson mystery. Sam is a Texas detective who has a talent for finding trouble and an even stronger talent for making his own life harder. A death in a house fire looks simple until Sam discovers the victim was killed before the flames began.

The Sam Lawson books pair murder investigations with dry humor, lively local characters, and East Texas settings that matter as much as the clues. Beneath the Surface sends Sam into a small town after a woman disappears, while Dark Harbor takes him to Martha's Vineyard, where a hoped-for break with Carla Davenport turns into another murder case. In Deadly Reputation, an old partner draws him into a possible serial-killer investigation, then Sam is framed for murder himself.

Wilson also writes outside the series. Red Dirt Blues follows Jade, an international thief whose search for a strange prize lands her in a tiny Texas town full of people she didn't plan to need. It is a crime story with a lighter, more comic setup, but it keeps the same interest in outsiders, uneasy alliances, and characters who are never quite as simple as they first appear.

His plotting process is practical and flexible. Wilson starts with a broad outline, often knowing the crime and a few key moments, then lets new characters and details reshape the plan as he writes. He has said that real people and events often provide the raw material, which he changes into something fictional.

Wilson now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. He still has a running complaint about the winter cold.