Dwight Holing Books in Order

If you want the full Nick Drake journey: The Sorrow Hand → The Pity Heart → The Shaming Eyes
If you want a witty San Francisco caper: A Boatload → Bad Karma → Baby Blue → Shake City
If you want later Nick Drake at bigger scale: The Demon Skin → The Broken Blood → The Thunder Head → The Yellow Hair
If you want a stand-alone or stories: Hard Blue Empty or California Works → Over Our Heads Under Our Feet

Dwight Holing wrote his first mystery in third grade. He called it Bloody Murder, lettered the title in red ink, and got an F, a small origin story he still shares because it captures the humor and stubbornness that show up in his books.

Long before he turned to crime fiction, Holing studied journalism at the University of Oregon, where he also met his wife. He spent college summers working in the salmon fishery in Alaska, then exploring the backcountry after the season ended. After graduation he became a freelance writer, and assignments took him from the Amazon to Zanzibar. He wrote about adventure travel, conservation, natural history, and environmental issues, and also edited and wrote nonfiction books on those subjects for publishers that included Smithsonian Books, Time-Life, and Animal Planet. Journalism also gave him two habits that still define his fiction, steady discipline and a deep respect for research.

Wildlife, weather, and landscape are never just background in his work.

He started in short fiction, publishing stories in literary journals and picking up awards along the way, including the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. His collection California Works won the Selena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award, and Over Our Heads Under Our Feet showed the same reach, moving from intimate relationships to far-flung settings without losing sight of ordinary people under pressure. Those early books already carried many of the things readers now associate with Holing, strong sense of place, emotional stakes, and people trying to do the right thing when life gets messy.

His first novel, A Boatload, arrived in 2014 and introduced Jack McCoul, a San Francisco con artist who wants to go straight but keeps getting yanked back into trouble. The later Jack books, Bad Karma, Baby Blue, and Shake City, mix murder, scams, fast talk, and city politics with a lighter touch than the Nick Drake novels. Holing has said Jack began as a short story character and quickly proved too much fun to leave behind. Readers who like wit, momentum, and a hero who knows both the rules and how to bend them usually start there.

Then came Nick Drake.

Beginning with The Sorrow Hand in 2018, Holing shifted to the high desert of Harney County, Oregon, and to a Vietnam veteran turned wildlife ranger trying to build a life after war. Books like The Pity Heart, The Shaming Eyes, The Whisper Soul, and The Nowhere Bones pair murder cases with weather, wildlife, indigenous history, and the push and pull of social change. Later entries such as The Forever Feet, The Demon Skin, The Broken Blood, The Thunder Head, and The Yellow Hair widen Nick's world but keep the focus on motive, community, and what violence leaves behind. Holing has described these books as whydunnits as much as whodunnits, and that feels right. The series has also picked up honors, with The Broken Blood winning the 2025 Silver Falchion Award for Best Western.

Holing has not stayed in one lane. Hard Blue Empty is a stand-alone mystery that carries his concern for land, power, and survival into the Amazon rainforest. And his long nonfiction career still echoes through everything he writes. You can feel the reporter's eye in the details and the travel writer's habit of noticing what a place smells like, sounds like, and hides.

Now based in Carmel Valley, California, after moving there from the East Bay in 2019, Holing keeps the regular writing rhythm journalism taught him and still makes research trips that feed the novels. He lives with his wife and two dogs, and the landscape around him still seems to sneak onto the page.

Not bad for the kid whose first mystery got a failing grade.