Liam Campbell Books in Order

Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell arrives in the village of Newenham with his career already hanging by a thread. A disastrous case in Anchorage cost a family their lives and knocked him from sergeant back to trooper, exiling him to a wind scoured outpost that feels like the end of the road. Newenham has a six bed jail, a bar that doubles as a courtroom and more problems than one under resourced cop can reasonably handle.

In Fire And Ice Liam steps off the bush plane to find a headless body on the runway and his former lover, bush pilot Wyanet "Wy" Chouinard, kneeling beside it. That first investigation sets the tone for the series: murder and accident are often hard to tell apart in a place where everyone carries a gun, flies in bad weather and has good reasons not to talk to the police. Liam has to earn the wary trust of Native villagers, commercial fishermen and small time operators who see troopers as outsiders at best.

Subsequent books push him deeper into the complicated web of western Alaska. In So Sure Of Death an apparent family tragedy at sea hides uglier motives. Nothing Gold Can Stay turns a simple looking robbery into a chain of killings that reaches years into the past. Better To Rest shifts the focus to a World War II crash site uncovered in a glacier, dragging up long buried military secrets and forcing Liam to confront his own Air Force colonel father.

By Spoils of the Dead, Liam has been reassigned to the more prosperous town of Blewestown and married Wy, whose flying business and sharp instincts make her both asset and potential target. An archaeologist's death at a dig and the discovery of a child's skeleton yoke present day disputes over land and history to an old, unresolved crime. The books never forget that Alaska's boom towns are layered over older cultures and older wounds.

Where Kate Shugak works as an independent investigator, Liam is bound by procedures, bosses and politics. That difference gives the series a slightly more procedural feel, with crime scene work, chain of command battles and jurisdictional headaches layered on top of the usual frontier challenges. The tone still carries Stabenow's familiar mix of humor, grief and detail about daily life in the bush. Reading the Liam Campbell novels in order works best, and fans of the Kate books will enjoy the occasional crossovers, seeing familiar characters and events from the trooper's point of view.