Kidd & LuEllen Books in Order

The Kidd & LuEllen books sit at the intersection of crime caper and early computer thriller. Kidd paints watercolors, reads tarot cards, and makes his real living as a freelance hacker, breaking into systems for clients who want an opponent’s secrets wrecked or stolen. LuEllen is a professional burglar who loves risk almost as much as she loves Kidd.

Each novel hangs on one big job. In The Fool’s Run a defense contractor hires Kidd to sabotage a rival’s avionics project through a mix of data theft, rumor, and planted viruses. The Empress File sends Kidd and LuEllen to a corrupt Mississippi river town, where a local activist wants them to quietly collapse a city hall full of thieves. Later books pull them into encrypted‑data scandals and a hunt for whoever stole a laptop full of very dangerous secrets.

The stories are told in Kidd’s voice, so readers sit inside the planning as he maps networks, runs cons, and decides who can be trusted. Sandford leans into the nuts and bolts of hacking and surveillance—modems and phone phreaking in the early books, evolving tools in the later ones—but the real fun is in watching how the crew improvises when plans go sideways.

Compared with the Prey novels, the tone here is looser and more openly criminal. Kidd and LuEllen aim their schemes at people they see as worse than they are—crooked executives, dirty officials, violent enforcers—but they’re still thieves who live by their own ethics. Lucas Davenport appears on the margins now and then, and references to events in Minnesota quietly tie the series back into the larger Sandford universe.

Across four books you see a small criminal partnership that feels almost domestic at times: shared apartments, cats, art projects, tarot spreads before a job. That warmth sits right next to sudden violence and double crosses, giving the Kidd novels a different, sideways take on the same world of crime and consequence.