Joe Ide Books in Order

If you want the series from the beginning: IQ → Righteous → Wrecked
If you want the deepest personal arc: Righteous → Wrecked → Smoke → Fixit
If you want the twistiest case: Hi Five
If you want classic noir, updated for modern Los Angeles: The Goodbye Coast

Joe Ide is a Los Angeles crime writer whose fiction feels rooted in the city at street level. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles, in the East Adams area, with his extended Japanese American family. His grandparents stayed there because it was close to Little Tokyo, even as many other Japanese American families moved elsewhere, and most of Joe's friends were Black kids from the neighborhood. That mix of cultures, voices, and survival skills would later become the pulse of his books.

As a boy, he fell hard for Sherlock Holmes. What stayed with him was not the Victorian setting or the fog. It was the thrill of watching someone face danger and confusion with intelligence alone.

He did not become a novelist early. Ide earned a master's degree in education and first thought he would teach, but that plan did not last long. After trying teaching and then lecturing, he moved through a string of jobs, including management and consulting work, while also spending years writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Those screenwriting years mattered, even if they were frustrating. He learned scene building, pace, and dialogue, and he did sell work, but the movies never really happened. After enough false starts, disappointment, and time spent writing stories that did not feel fully his, he hit a wall. By his own account, even opening the screenwriting software started to feel bad.

That was the turn.

In his early fifties, he switched to fiction and began writing a detective novel that drew directly from his own experience, his neighborhood, and his lifelong love of Holmes. The result was IQ, published in 2016. It introduced Isaiah Quintabe, an unofficial detective in East Long Beach who helps the people the police ignore, and it gave Ide a character big enough to carry brains, humor, grief, and a very stubborn moral code.

Readers responded fast. IQ won the Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards for a first novel, and it was also nominated for an Edgar. Ide followed it with Righteous, Wrecked, Hi Five, Smoke, and Fixit, each one widening Isaiah's world while keeping the stories close to the people and places that shaped him. Readers often come for the mysteries, but stay for the talk, the odd warmth, and the way Ide can make a body shop, a corner store, or a cramped apartment feel fully alive.

He can write a joke. He can also land a bruise.

That balance runs through all of his work. His novels keep returning to outsiders, hustlers, neighborhood loyalties, broken families, race, class, and the long shadow of loss. Even when he took on Philip Marlowe in The Goodbye Coast, he stayed interested in the same basic question, how do decent people hold on to some kind of code in a city that does not make that easy?

Ide now lives in Santa Monica, California. He is often described as a late bloomer, and that fits, but only partly. His books read like the work of someone who spent a long time listening, watching, failing, and storing things up before he found the form that was waiting for him all along.