Dr. Schwartzman Books in Order

The Dr. Schwartzman series centers on Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman, a medical examiner working with the San Francisco Police Department. Annabelle’s job is careful, exacting, and often grim. She examines the dead for details other people have missed, then helps homicide investigators turn those details into answers for the living.

It is also the first place where she feels she belongs.

Annabelle has escaped an abusive marriage and spent years trying to create a life that is hers. Her work gives her structure and purpose, but her past never feels entirely distant. The series uses that tension well: Annabelle knows how to stay calm around violence and death, yet the threat of her former husband can make even an ordinary moment feel unsafe. Her determination to keep moving forward is a key part of every book.

She is joined by homicide inspector Hal Harris, a trusted colleague whose steady presence becomes important as the cases grow more complicated. Their work takes them through San Francisco, from crime scenes and autopsies to parks, hospitals, and neighborhoods where a victim’s history can be as revealing as physical evidence. The books blend forensic procedure with the close, uneasy feeling of a thriller in which danger has a personal address.

Exhume is the best place to start. A murder victim bears disturbing similarities to Annabelle, pushing her to question whether someone from her past has found her. In Excise, she returns to the job while recovering from serious medical treatment, only to confront the murder of a doctor connected to her own care. The case lets the series show Annabelle’s toughness without pretending that toughness makes fear or illness easy.

Expose sends Annabelle and Hal after a killer linked to a murdered woman, a missing child, and a crime buried years earlier. In Expire, the personal danger that has followed Annabelle through the series becomes impossible to ignore. The Ex, a prequel, looks back at an earlier case and shows why Annabelle finds it so hard to walk away when the evidence points one way but her instincts say otherwise.

These are dark, propulsive mysteries with a strong forensic angle. Read them in order for the fullest picture of Annabelle’s recovery, her partnership with Hal, and the long shadow cast by the life she escaped.