Gotham Books in Order

Jason Starr's Gotham books sit in an interesting corner of the Batman world. These are stories set before Batman fully arrives, or in the unstable space around that arrival, so the focus stays on cops, gangsters, damaged families, and a city that already feels sick to its core. Even when strange things start showing up, the books are still driven by crime, corruption, and people trying to hold their ground in a place that keeps slipping.

That makes the series feel closer to noir than to a standard superhero novel.

Dawn of Darkness works as a prequel, reaching back before the show's opening and putting Thomas Wayne near the center of the story. A break-in at Wayne Manor and the death of a masked intruder look like the start of a simple mystery, but Gotham never stays simple for long. Harvey Bullock investigates it like a cop. Thomas sees it as something more personal, and potentially more dangerous, with ties to his family, his company, and the buried rot that surrounds both.

City of Monsters moves forward into the chaos after season two. Jim Gordon is no longer just working cases inside the system. He is out in the city hunting Hugo Strange's escaped monsters for bounty money, which tells you a lot about where Gotham is at by this point. Fish Mooney wants her place back in the underworld. Selina Kyle wants more than survival. The city itself feels caught between old organized crime and the newer, weirder threats that are starting to define it.

What links the books is not just continuity, but mood. Starr writes Gotham as a place where institutions are already cracked, so almost everyone is improvising. Cops are compromised, rich families are vulnerable, criminals are trying to adapt, and every new crisis reveals something older and uglier underneath. Even when the material edges toward comic-book weirdness, the energy stays grounded in pressure, bad options, and shifting loyalties.

If you like Gotham stories where the city is still inventing itself, these novels are a good fit. They live in that early, unstable period when Thomas Wayne can still drive the plot, Bullock can still carry the detective side, and Jim Gordon can feel one bad week away from losing everything. The monsters matter, but the bigger threat is always Gotham itself.