Greg Kincaid Books in Order

If you want the book that introduced the McCrays: A Dog Named Christmas → Christmas with Tucker → A Christmas Home → Noelle
If you prefer the family's backstory first: Christmas with Tucker → A Dog Named Christmas → A Christmas Home → Noelle
If you want Todd McCray at the center: A Dog Named Christmas → A Christmas Home → Noelle
If you want Greg Kincaid outside the Christmas books: Tantric Coconuts

Greg Kincaid was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1957, but the landscape that shaped him most was rural Kansas. His father served in the Navy, so the family moved often when he was young. By fifth grade they had settled on his maternal grandparents' farm in Johnson County, west of Olathe, where horses, dogs, creeks, and open country became part of everyday life.

Books got there early too. Kincaid has said his mother read to him and his sister every night, and he grew up wandering through stories by Mark Twain, Harper Lee, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Walter Farley. When he was not reading, he was outside with a dog close behind, which helps explain why animals in his fiction feel like living characters instead of props.

Kansas stayed with him.

After law school, Kincaid went into practice in 1982 with a large firm in the Kansas City area. Corporate law gave him steady work, but it did not light much of a creative spark. He later opened his own office in Olathe, close to the farm where he grew up, and his family lived in his grandparents' old farmhouse while he raised three children and wrote in his spare time.

One of his early projects was a screenplay called Easter Lily Hill. It never quite came together as a film, but the Kansas farm family at its center stuck with him and eventually found a new home in fiction. He published his first novel, Death Walk at Acoma, in the early 1990s and kept going through a long stretch of near misses before A Dog Named Christmas changed everything. That book became a New York Times bestseller and a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie. A later McCray family book, Christmas with Tucker, was adapted for television too.

His law practice shaped him in another way as well. Much of his work moved toward family law and mediation, and he spent time around children in jails, halfway houses, and treatment centers. Again and again, he noticed what was missing from many of their lives: books. That pushed him into literacy advocacy, a cause he has supported for years alongside his legal work.

Most readers know Kincaid for the McCray family novels, A Dog Named Christmas, Christmas with Tucker, A Christmas Home, and Noelle. Those books return to rural Kansas, family strain, grief, stubborn hope, and dogs that somehow pull people toward their better selves. Readers tend to like the warmth, the small-town setting, and the respect he shows characters who are often underestimated, especially Todd McCray, whose gift with animals becomes the emotional center of the series. Kincaid has also said that parts of his own life echo through the books, and he even slipped his children's names into them. Even in Tantric Coconuts, his more offbeat road-trip novel, he stays interested in companionship, spiritual searching, and second chances.

He still seems happiest close to the life that made the work possible.

For many years Kincaid has continued writing while staying active in the law, especially in divorce and family mediation. He has long made his home in eastern Kansas, and his everyday life has included the kind of animal-filled household that feels instantly recognizable from his fiction. Farm chores, legal files, family stories, and dogs underfoot, that is the mix behind his books.