Nickel Books in Order

The Nickel books are Aric Davis at his most hardboiled, and maybe his most human, too. They follow Nickel, a boy surviving on his own in Michigan after foster care, loss, and more adult failure than any kid should have to absorb. He is only twelve when the series opens, but the voice is older because his life has made it that way.

Nickel makes money however he can. He works as a private investigator, sells drugs to older kids, and blackmails predators he finds online. That setup tells you the tone right away: this is YA noir with dirt under its nails. Nickel has a code, but it is a street code, built from harm, not safety. He helps people, especially kids, yet he does it from the margins, where survival comes first and trust is always expensive.

He survives by noticing what everyone else refuses to see.

In Nickel Plated, a girl named Arrow asks him to find her missing little sister, Shelby. What starts like a bad runaway case opens into something far worse, and the book's real shock is not just the violence, but how ordinary the cover for that violence looks. Davis uses neighborhoods, school parking lots, and suburban routines to show how evil can hide in plain sight when adults have enough money, status, or nerve.

Tunnel Vision brings Nickel back for a different kind of case. Betty and June start digging into the fifteen-year-old murder of June's aunt Mandy Reasoner, and Nickel gets pulled into the search while trying to keep his own life from sliding sideways. The sequel keeps the noir mood but opens the series up a little, giving Nickel partners, friction, and a chance to bounce off other smart kids instead of carrying every scene alone. It also shows how badly old lies can shape the present.

Across both books, the ongoing story is not just the case. It is Nickel himself, trying to stay free, protect vulnerable kids, and decide what kind of man he might become if he lives long enough to grow into one. He is suspicious, funny in a dry way, and deeply angry, but there is also a stubborn decency to him. That mix is the hook.

If you read the series in order, you can watch Davis build Nickel's world from pure survival into something a little more connected. The books are fast, dark, and intentionally rough-edged. If you like detective fiction that borrows the mood of old-school noir but gives the center of the story to a kid the system left behind, this is the place to start.