Holland Taylor Books in Order

At the center of the Holland Taylor novels is a St. Paul private investigator still carrying the weight of his past. Taylor is a former cop who lost his wife and young daughter in a car crash, a man who hides grief behind dry humor and a stubborn sense of what is fair.

In Penance, readers first meet him at a low point, hauled in for questioning when a man he once threatened turns up dead and drawn into a brutal tangle of Minnesota politics, blackmail, and ambition around a rising gubernatorial candidate.

Practice to Deceive moves him from campaign offices to the quiet streets of a Florida retirement community. An elderly widow has lost her life savings to a slick investment adviser who poured her money into a failing housing project outside the Twin Cities, and Taylor follows the money into a real estate scheme where city officials, developers, and hired muscle are all protecting the same rotten deal.

Again and again, Taylor discovers that money and power in Minnesota have very long memories.

In Dearly Departed, a recorded message from a missing woman becomes his only real lead. Alison Emerton once walked into a Minneapolis winter night and never came home, leaving behind her wallet, her boots, and a tape naming a violent ex as the man who will kill her, and months later Taylor is hired to find out what really happened. The search uncovers a trail of grudges that reaches far beyond one obvious suspect and shows how easily a vulnerable woman can be erased when people decide she is inconvenient.

Later books find Taylor working quieter jobs until cases with heavy baggage yank him back into danger. Darkness, Sing Me a Song plunges him into the brittle world of old money when a wealthy matriarch is charged with murdering her son's fiancée, a woman Taylor himself had been investigating, while First, Kill the Lawyers and Girl in a Dumpster pull him into a hacked cache of explosive legal files and a sophisticated kidnapping ring that preys on the daughters of Minnesota's rich and notorious. Across the series the mysteries are driven as much by guilt, loyalty, and class as by bullets, giving readers a tour of the Twin Cities that runs from neighborhood bars to lakeside mansions.