RJ McMillen Books in Order

RJ McMillen writes mysteries shaped by islands, working boats, rain, and the hard-to-reach communities of British Columbia's coast. Her Dan Connor books place crimes and personal history against a landscape where travel often depends on tide, weather, and local knowledge.

McMillen was born in England and raised in Australia. She later spent three years working in Greece, where she met her Irish-Canadian husband. They married in India, then moved to Canada, where they raised their family.

The sea became a major part of her life.

McMillen and her husband spent years exploring the west coast of British Columbia aboard their sailboat, Maquinna. Those trips gave her a close view of the region's coves, islands, fishing villages, and changeable water. That experience shows up in her fiction, where boats are not scenery, they are how characters get home, reach a crime scene, or find themselves stranded.

Before her mystery novels, McMillen wrote freelance articles and a weekly newspaper column. Her work appeared in publications including Pacific Yachting, B.C. Outdoors, Greyzine, and Seasons Magazine. She also wrote the travel guide Driving Baja: A Guide for First Timers, a practical book for travelers heading down Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

Her first Dan Connor novel, Dark Moon Walking, arrived in 2014. It introduces Dan, a former police officer grieving the murder of his wife and trying to find peace on the water. A missing marine biologist and a threatening boat pull him back into danger, and back into contact with Walker, a man Dan once sent to prison.

That uneasy partnership is the heart of the series.

In Black Tide Rising, Dan and Walker investigate a disappearance on Nootka Island, where a damaged totem pole and a pool of blood point to something serious. Green River Falling sends them north when pipeline workers are murdered and Walker's friend becomes a suspect. Gray Sea Running follows a search for four missing men in the Broughton Archipelago, while old memories complicate Dan's effort to find Walker.

McMillen returns to questions of loyalty, loss, environmental pressure, and what it means to belong to a place. Her stories pair police work with practical coastal skills, and they make room for the different knowledge Dan and Walker bring to a case. The mysteries have real stakes, but the relationships matter just as much.

She has divided her time between Canada and Mexico, and has also taught creative writing in Jalisco. It fits the path of a writer whose work moves easily between travel, community, and the pull of the coast.