Love, Lust & Murder Books in Order

Love, Lust & Murder is Alex at his most direct noir. The series begins in Throwback, where Fred Reed, a Midwestern transplant looking for a new start in California, falls for a married woman named Margie. The problem is not just that she is married. Her husband Frank is a bounty hunter, and Fred works for him. From there the setup tightens fast: bruises, desire, greed, a plan that is supposed to solve everything, and the old noir truth that once people start talking themselves into murder, nothing stays simple for long.

The first bad choice is never the last one.

What makes the series work is that Alex keeps the emotional logic ugly but believable. Fred is not some cool criminal mastermind. He is a man who wants love, escape, and a future, and who talks himself into thinking he can get all three without paying the full price. Margie wants out, but she wants money too. Frank is not a man anyone mistakes for harmless. By the time Throwback is moving, the whole arrangement feels like a pressure cooker with the lid rattling.

Then comes Backlash, which deals with the aftershocks rather than pretending the damage is over. Fred gets out of jail years later with revenge on his mind, and the series shifts from lust and conspiracy into reckoning. The people who shaped his fall are still out there. So are the old grudges. That gives the second book a different energy, colder, more methodical, but just as dangerous.

The California setting matters a lot. This is not sunlit fantasy California. It is a harder, seedier landscape of work, resentment, shabby ambition, and people trying to improvise their way into a better life. Alex keeps the prose lean and the moral atmosphere dirty. Nobody is fully innocent, and almost everyone has convinced themselves they are only one compromise away from getting what they deserve.

If you like noir built on bad chemistry, greed, and the long consequences of one reckless plan, this two-book run is a strong place to start. It is small-scale in one sense, just a few people crossing the wrong lines, but the emotional wreckage spreads wide.