DB Jackson Books in Order

If you want the core Ethan Kaille story: Thieftaker → Thieves' Quarry → A Plunder of Souls → Dead Man's Reach
If you want epic fantasy with time travel: Time's Children → Time's Demon → Time's Assassin
If you want the Ethan Kaille backstory first: The Price of Doing Business → A Spell of Vengeance → Thieftaker
If you want the later Thieftaker return: The Witch's Storm → The Cloud Prison → The Adams Gambit

D.B. Jackson is the pen name fantasy writer David B. Coe uses for some of his historical and epic fantasy. He was born in New York and grew up in the suburbs outside New York City, in a family that cared a lot about books. That early mix of reading, storytelling, and curiosity seems to have stuck.

He has said he wrote his first novel when he was six. It was called Jim the Talking Fish, and by his own telling it was not exactly a polished masterpiece. But it does tell you something useful about him. Long before publication, awards, or pen names, he was already the kid making up worlds and putting them on paper.

The academic detour lasted a while.

Coe studied at Brown University, worked for a time as a political consultant, and then went to Stanford, where he earned both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in U.S. history. For a period, academia looked like a real possibility. Instead, he turned back to fiction, began writing full time in 1994, and published his first novel in 1997.

That first wave of books, starting with Children of Amarid, helped establish him as a writer of large-scale fantasy. The LonTobyn books won the Crawford Fantasy Award, and they already showed some of the habits that would stay with him: layered politics, consequences that ripple outward, and magic that works as part of a society instead of sitting off to the side. He later broadened that range with books like Rules of Ascension and the urban fantasy novel Spell Blind.

As D.B. Jackson, he took a turn toward history in a way that feels especially natural for someone with a doctorate in the subject. Thieftaker introduces Ethan Kaille, a conjurer and investigator in pre-Revolutionary Boston, and books like Thieves' Quarry, A Plunder of Souls, and Dead Man's Reach keep pushing that blend of mystery, magic, and colonial unrest. These are not costume dramas with a spell or two dropped in. They are lived-in street stories, full of taverns, politics, fear, rivalries, and bad decisions.

History never really left his fiction.

You can see that again in the Islevale books, Time's Children, Time's Demon, and Time's Assassin. These novels move back toward epic fantasy, but they do it with time travel, war, court politics, and characters who are asked to grow up very fast. Readers often respond to the scale of the worldbuilding, but just as important is the way the books stay close to Tobias, Mara, and the human cost of trying to change a broken future.

Across all of these projects, Coe tends to return to a few favorite questions. What happens when institutions fail? What does power demand from decent people? How do friendship, loyalty, and love hold up when the world gets dangerous? Even when the settings shift, from colonial Boston to invented island kingdoms, those concerns keep his books feeling connected.

He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, a small college town on the Cumberland Plateau, with his wife, a biology professor, and their family. He has written more than two dozen novels and many short stories, and he still comes across as someone who enjoys both halves of the job, dreaming up the story and then doing the hard work to make it run.