Jonathan Nasaw Books in Order

If you want the core crime series: The Girls He Adored → Fear Itself → Twenty-Seven Bones → When She Was Bad → The Boys from Santa Cruz
If you want a quicker taste of his psychological thrillers: Fear Itself → Twenty-Seven Bones
If you want the supernatural side: The World on Blood → Shadows
If you want his earlier, more grounded fiction: West of the Moon → Shakedown Street

Jonathan Nasaw was born in Pacific Grove, California, on August 26, 1947. His father was a lawyer, his mother was a teacher, and books were clearly close to the family, his older brother David Nasaw later became a well-known historian and biographer. Nasaw studied first at the University of Wisconsin and then at SUNY Stony Brook before finding his own route into fiction.

Before the thrillers, he lived a pretty varied working life. He taught school in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He also spent time in St. Croix playing bass and singing in local groups, and later taught meditation through the Arica Institute.

He has never seemed interested in staying in one lane.

His first novel, Easy Walking, appeared in 1975, and later reference sources note that it drew on autobiography. Even early on, his fiction moved in different directions. West of the Moon is a tender, painful story about a dying child and the adults trying to care for him, while Shakedown Street follows a teenage girl and her mother through homelessness, hustling, and hard luck in Berkeley.

In the 1990s he swerved toward darker and stranger material. The World on Blood and Shadows take vampire fiction out of old gothic spaces and drop it into modern California, where blood works like an addiction and hidden subcultures have their own rules. Those books are odd, sexual, sometimes funny, and much more interested in appetite and self-control than in old-school supernatural glamour.

Most readers, though, know Nasaw through E.L. Pender, the rumpled investigator at the center of The Girls He Adored, Fear Itself, Twenty-Seven Bones, When She Was Bad, and The Boys from Santa Cruz. These novels run on strong psychological hooks, killers with fractured identities, murders built around phobias, ritual brutality, and the uneasy overlap between crime solving and mental damage. But the books work because Pender is such a human center. He is aging, stubborn, offbeat, and often a little out of place, which gives the series some welcome grit and humor.

Across the whole body of work, Nasaw keeps circling outsiders, damaged families, addicts, drifters, patients, and people trying to hold themselves together when the world is pushing the other way. He likes fringe settings too, hospices, communes, islands, cultish groups, recovery circles, temporary homes, places where people are trying to start over and may not get the chance.

Two of his best-known thrillers, The Girls He Adored and Fear Itself, were Literary Guild selections, and publisher bios still point new readers to those books first. Those same bios say he lives in Pacific Grove, California, which gives his career a nice full-circle shape. In a brief author Q and A from 2010, he described a good day as finishing work, feeding the koi in his ponds, and settling into a hammock with a cigar and a good book.

Those details fit. However wild the premise, a Jonathan Nasaw novel is usually anchored by people who are worn down, a little strange, and still trying to keep going.