Jessica Blackwood Books in Order

The Jessica Blackwood books follow an FBI agent who grew up onstage. Jessica is a fourth generation magician from a turbulent show business family. She walks away from the act to become a cop, trading card tricks for case files, but her past refuses to stay buried. Whenever a crime scene looks like a miracle or a haunting, the Bureau’s resident “Witchfinder,” Dr. Jeffrey Ailes, calls Jessica in to explain the impossible.

In Angel Killer, a hacker calling himself Warlock hijacks the FBI’s website and replaces it with coordinates that lead to a Michigan cemetery. There, a dead girl appears to be clawing out of her own grave, despite records that say she died years earlier. Drawing on the tricks she learned backstage, Jessica realizes that someone is using large scale illusions to stage murders that look supernatural. Warlock is clever, theatrical, and obsessed with her, and their duel gives the series its first defining rivalry.

A short adventure, Fire in the Sky, sends Jessica and rookie agent Nadine to Louisiana to chase down an elderly man’s decades old account of a strange event in the night sky. What looks like a wild goose chase forces Jessica to confront how much her skepticism is shaped by her own past on the circuit, and how easily memories can be bent by stories told over and over again.

Name of the Devil raises the stakes. A church in rural Appalachia explodes and the congregation ends up naked and posed in nearby trees, as if some infernal force scooped them up. The local sheriff is missing, rumors about demons spread, and Jessica is pulled back into the field to prove that human hands, not Satanic ones, are to blame. The case leads from West Virginia hills to cartel controlled corners of Mexico and even to Vatican corridors, as an old cassette tape and a long buried crime connect the murders to a very human hunger for revenge.

In Black Fall, Jessica is still living with the fallout from the Warlock cases when a woman with a baby attacks her during what should be a routine surveillance. Hours later an earthquake rattles the East Coast, and a video surfaces of a Nobel Prize winning physicist, dead for eight years, predicting the exact time and place of the quake. Jessica finds herself juggling a mystery attacker, doomsday style “prophecies,” and the possibility that Warlock is pulling strings from the shadows. The book digs deeper into her relationship with her grandfather, a master illusionist who becomes a reluctant mentor, and earned Mayne an Edgar Award nomination.

Jessica’s world eventually collides with Dr. Theo Cray’s in the crossover novels Mastermind and The Final Equinox, and she later joins the ensemble in the Specialists books. Across all of these appearances, the core of the Jessica Blackwood series remains the same: high tension investigations where the question is not just who did it, but how they made the crime look like magic in the first place.