Owen Laukkanen Books in Order

If you want his flagship crime thrillers: The Professionals  Criminal Enterprise  Kill Fee  The Stolen Ones
If you prefer darker, socially focused mysteries: The Watcher in the Wall  The Forgotten Girls
If you want Pacific Northwest noir with a great dog: Deception Cove  Lone Jack Trail
If you like high-seas adventure: Gale Force
If youre here for his young adult novels: How to Win at High School  The Fixes  The Wild

Owen Laukkanen was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1983 and grew up across the country in Windsor, Ontario. Even as a kid he gravitated toward crime stories and adventure novels, but he was just as interested in how they were built.

In high school and university he kept writing, eventually enrolling in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program. There he studied fiction, workshopped early stories, and began to imagine that writing books could be more than a daydream.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2006 and ran straight into the reality of trying to find any job that would cover the bills.

For a while he sent out résumés to almost everything, from office work to oddball gigs he thought might make good material someday. One of those ads, buried on a classifieds site, asked for a writer to cover the World Series of Poker. Laukkanen knew almost nothing about poker, but he applied anyway and got the job.

The work turned into three years on the road as a poker reporter, trailing tournaments around North America, Europe, and Asia. Long days in casinos and hotel rooms gave him a close-up view of risk, greed, luck, and the ways ordinary people behave when the stakes get uncomfortably high.

It was an unusual apprenticeship, but it taught him how much story can live inside a few tense hours.

Those experiences fed directly into his first novel, The Professionals. Written in the wake of the late-2000s financial crisis, it follows four underemployed college graduates who start kidnapping executives for relatively small ransoms. The book became the opening volume in his Stevens and Windermere series and earned shortlist spots for several major crime-fiction awards.

Across that series, including novels like Criminal Enterprise, Kill Fee, The Stolen Ones, The Watcher in the Wall, and The Forgotten Girls, he pairs fast, propulsive plots with a steady focus on character. Investigators Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere move through Minnesota winters, big Midwestern cities, and backroads towns, facing everything from bank robbers and hired killers to human traffickers and online predators. The cases are tense, but the books never lose sight of family life, moral compromise, and the people caught in the middle.

Laukkanen has also stepped outside traditional police thrillers. Gale Force draws on stories from his sea-faring family to tell a high-risk salvage adventure in the stormy waters off Alaska. His Neah Bay novels, Deception Cove and Lone Jack Trail, shift to the rugged Washington coast, following an ex-Marine with PTSD, an ex-con trying to stay straight, and the rescue dog who ties their lives together.

Under the name Owen Matthews he has written young adult novels such as How to Win at High School and The Fixes, sharp, fast-paced stories about teenagers, status, and the trouble that follows bad decisions. Later he returned to his own name for The Wild, a thriller about a wilderness boot camp where the lessons turn deadly. One of these young adult projects has been picked up for development for the screen.

Laukkanen lives in Vancouver, where he continues to write full time and share his house with his rescue dog, Lucy. Away from the desk he has helped transport rescue dogs to new homes, trading hours at the keyboard for long drives through western Canada. The mix of landscapes, people, and hard choices he encounters on the road still finds its way back onto the page.