Liars Island (Cole Baxter) Books in Order

Liars Island is a shared suspense setting built around one very good idea: a beautiful island community where almost everyone is hiding something. Cole Baxter's entry into that world is Panic Pond, a compact mystery that uses the island's polished surface and secretive social life to good effect. If you like small communities where everybody knows everybody, and where that only makes the lies harder to untangle, this is the kind of setup that works fast.

The key figure in Baxter's installment is Detective Amber Smith of the Liars Island Police Department. She is not investigating a flashy murder spree or a globe-spanning conspiracy. Instead, Panic Pond starts with a break-in at Kelley's Gas Station, a local business hit hard enough to make the case matter to the whole community. What sounds straightforward at first quickly gets messier. The evidence points in several directions at once, and island gossip does what gossip always does, it decides who looks guilty long before the facts are settled.

That is really the engine of this setting.

Liars Island runs on class tension, old reputations, private grudges, and the quiet power of people who know how to steer a story before the truth gets there. In Baxter's version of the island, wealthy locals, struggling workers, and people with bad histories all move through the same tight space, and everyone has reasons to protect their own. Some suspects are judged because of who they used to be. Others get the benefit of the doubt because of money, family standing, or the simple fact that the island likes them better.

Amber has to work through all of that while trying to stay focused on the actual case. Part of the fun of Panic Pond is that it leans into the local texture of the place. This is not an anonymous city mystery. It is a story where personal connections matter, rumors spread fast, and an investigation can turn awkward the moment a suspect is somebody's relative, old friend, or favorite scapegoat. Amber goes undercover at the gas station, which gives the book a more close-up, ground-level feel than a standard police procedural.

The tone sits somewhere between a small-town mystery and a domestic suspense novel. The danger is real, but so is the social pressure. Baxter uses the island's picture-perfect image against itself, showing how much resentment, fear, and self-interest can live under a postcard setting. Because this is part of a shared world, you get the sense that other secrets are always sitting just off the page.

Even so, Panic Pond works perfectly well on its own. You can come to it for the island atmosphere, the undercover angle, or the tightly wound mystery. What you should expect is a story where appearances are unreliable, the community is as much a problem as the crime, and the truth is harder to reach than anyone wants to admit.