Erik Storey Books in Order

Erik Storey was born in Cody, Wyoming, and moved to Rangely, Colorado, as a child. A lot of his life was shaped by the country around him, especially the summers he spent on his great-grandfather's homestead and in a remote cabin in the Flat Tops wilderness. Those places show up all through his fiction, not as postcard scenery, but as working landscapes with weather, danger, and memory built into them.

He grew up outdoors, and in a family where reading was part of daily life.

Storey has said the Flat Tops cabin had no electricity, so when the sun went down, people read. That simple routine did a lot of work. He read westerns, adventure stories, crime novels, and anything else he could get his hands on, and he started writing as a kid when he ran out of things to read. Long before he published a novel, he was already trying to build the kinds of stories he wanted to read.

The road to authorship was not neat. Before his books came out, he worked a string of outdoor jobs across Colorado and Wyoming, including ranch hand, wilderness guide, horseback guide, hunter, and dogsled musher. He also earned sharpshooter and marksman qualifications. All of that gave him a practical feel for land, animals, firearms, and survival, which helps make his thrillers feel lived in instead of researched from a desk.

Writing took the long way around.

He wrote short fiction after college, usually in the winter gaps between seasonal jobs. The bigger turn came when he was in his early thirties, had a winter without steady work, and his wife urged him to try a novel. He wrote much of that first draft while caring for his infant daughter and leaned on western Colorado places he knew well. It took years and many drafts to get the book into shape.

That novel became Nothing Short of Dying in 2016. It introduced Clyde Barr, a drifter and ex-mercenary who returns to Colorado and gets pulled into a desperate rescue. Readers who click with Storey usually respond to the same mix: fast action, rough country, a capable but damaged hero, and a strong sense that the land itself can help or hurt. The book feels like a thriller, but it also has the bones of a modern western.

Storey followed it with A Promise to Kill in 2017, sending Clyde Barr into trouble around a Ute reservation and an outlaw biker gang. The books show the themes he comes back to most: loners with a moral code, battered family ties, and ordinary people caught under the weight of dangerous men.

He has said he prefers writing from memory when he can, and that may be why the physical details stick. A campsite, a horse, a rifle, a cold morning in high country, he writes them with the ease of someone who has actually been there. That background keeps the novels grounded, even when the action turns wild.

These days he lives in Grand Junction, Colorado, with his family. The setting still fits. Even as his career moved from short stories to Clyde Barr thrillers, the mountains, back roads, and hard country never really left the center of the work.