Old Wives' Tales Books in Order

Old Wives' Tales is Tamara Thorne's loose series of strange northern California mysteries, built around folklore, isolated towns, and the sort of local legend that sensible people might laugh off right up until it turns dangerous. The books share a world and recurring characters, especially Sheriff Zach Tully, but each brings a different myth or threat to the foreground.

The first book, Eternity, introduces Zach when he leaves Los Angeles for the sheriff's job in a small mountain town that he expects to be quiet. Eternity is not quiet. It is home to strange residents, unexplained phenomena, mountain legends, and killings that seem tied to a figure from the past. Zach arrives carrying grief and a need for a calmer life, only to become the person responsible for making sense of the town's impossible problems.

Eternity is never as ordinary as it looks.

The second book, The Selkie Wives, moves Zach to Fort Charles, a scenic coastal tourist town near Eternity. This time, bodies and sea lore point toward a threat connected to sailors, ships, and creatures from the water. The story brings a different flavor to the series, trading snowy mountain weirdness for maritime dread and a mystery with folklore at its heart.

Both books combine a crime-story engine with supernatural horror. Zach is a lawman, so he investigates evidence, witnesses, motives, and murder scenes. Yet the usual explanations keep falling short. The people around him may believe in Bigfoot, ghosts, vanished historical figures, mermaids, or old curses, and sometimes the weirdest account turns out to be the most useful one.

Thorne keeps the tone lively even when the stakes are grim. The towns are populated by memorable eccentrics, and the stories have room for jokes, romance, and local color alongside serial killers and creatures that do not belong in any official report. The result feels part police procedural, part dark fantasy, and part road trip through California's more peculiar corners.

Folklore is evidence here.

Read Eternity first. It establishes Zach, his losses, and the odd logic of the world he has entered. Then continue with The Selkie Wives, which gives him a new jurisdiction and a new kind of supernatural case. The books are ideal for readers who want mysteries with haunted history, offbeat towns, and a sheriff who has learned that the impossible still leaves clues.