Larry Enmon Books in Order

If you want the best first book: The Burial Place
If you want the Rob and Frank cases in order: The Burial Place → City of Fear → Murder So Foul
If you want national security suspense: Class III Threat → Worst Case Scenario
If you want the darkest recent Dallas case: Murder So Foul

Larry Enmon was born in Shelby County, Texas, and grew up in East Texas. Before he ever published a novel, he spent decades in law enforcement, which helps explain why his fiction feels so sure about pressure, procedure, and the way one small clue can change everything. He writes crime stories, but he comes to them from lived experience.

In 1975 he earned a degree in law enforcement and police science and joined the Houston Police Department. He worked patrol and vice, and those years gave him a ground-level view of crime that later fed straight into his books. On his own site, he boils part of that stretch down to a line with some bite: he was shot at, but never hit.

That is not workshop talk.

In 1981 Enmon moved to the U.S. Secret Service. His career took him around the country and overseas on protective assignments, and he later served in Dallas as the Secret Service liaison to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. He also trained with the FBI and CIA on investigations involving suspected weapons of mass destruction. Altogether, he spent thirty-seven years in public service before retiring in 2012.

Writing came later, and in a way that makes sense for someone who spent so much time traveling. Enmon has said that books were his steady companion on long flights and in hotel rooms, and somewhere along the way he started thinking seriously about telling his own stories. After retirement, he finally had the time to try, and the shift from reports to fiction began for real.

His writing philosophy is simple: tell a good story, put strong characters in an interesting place, and give them something urgent to deal with. You can see that immediately in The Burial Place, his debut novel, which introduces Dallas detectives Rob Soliz and Frank Pierce. It mixes a missing-person case, political pressure, and cult shadows, but it stays anchored in the day-to-day work of an investigation.

He stayed with those detectives in City of Fear and later Murder So Foul. Readers who click with the Rob and Frank books usually like the Dallas setting, the procedural detail, and the contrast between two veteran partners who keep finding themselves in uglier situations than expected. The cases brush up against gang violence, occult rumor, and brutal crime scenes, but the books work because the cops at the center feel like working professionals.

He likes stories that move.

Enmon also writes bigger national security thrillers. Class III Threat follows a Secret Service agent in Dallas as a possible assassination plot begins to take shape, while Worst Case Scenario starts with the disappearance of six nuclear warheads after an ambush in New Mexico. These books shift from city policing to federal crisis mode, but they carry the same strengths: clean setups, practical detail, and a strong sense of how official systems behave under strain.

Across all of his fiction, a few patterns keep returning. Texas matters, both the cities and the rougher country beyond them. Politics and bureaucracy matter too, especially when they start squeezing the people doing the actual work. Enmon seems most interested in professionals under pressure, the men and women who have to act before they have the full picture. These days he lives in North Texas with his wife, and he has two children. He also spends time at his East Texas ranch and at a mountain cabin in North Carolina.