Robert Dunn Books in Order

If you want the full Katrina Williams journey: A Living Grave → A Particular Darkness → A Dark Path → A Killing Secret
If you want a lean standalone crime novel: Dead Man's Badge
If you want dark Ozarks horror: The Dead Ground → Behind the Darkness → Motorman
If you want supernatural fantasy and dystopian edges: The Red Highway → The Harrowing → The Sound of Distant Engines

Robert Dunn was born in Alabama and spent part of his childhood moving with an Army family before finally putting down roots in Nixa, Missouri. That background matters when you read him. His books often carry both the discipline of military life and the rough, lived-in feel of the Missouri Ozarks.

He studied at Drury College, where he focused on communications and film and also dug into philosophy, religion, and theater. It is an unusual mix, but it helps explain why his fiction can move so easily between crime, horror, faith, violence, and dark humor.

He started young.

Dunn has said he wrote his first book at eleven, turning a run of Jack Kirby comics into a handwritten novel. Later he spent years in video and film production, writing and producing everything from television commercials to documentaries, training films, and travelogues. That practical background shows up in his fiction. The scenes move, the images land fast, and even the strangest ideas are told in a clear, grounded way.

He did not stay in one lane.

Readers who come to Dunn through crime fiction usually start with A Living Grave, the first Katrina Williams novel. It introduces a sheriff's detective in the Missouri Ozarks who is sharp, angry, wounded, and hard to forget. The follow-ups, A Particular Darkness, A Dark Path, and A Killing Secret, keep the police procedural shape but make plenty of room for grief, trauma, and local history that refuses to stay buried.

His standalones show the same interests in a different key. Dead Man's Badge is a hard, fast border thriller about a career criminal who takes the identity of his dead twin brother and ends up wearing a badge. Behind the Darkness turns to alien abduction horror. The Red Highway mixes faith, race, and apocalypse against the backdrop of Los Angeles in 1992. The Harrowing goes even further out, sending a mercenary biker into hell and letting myth, religion, and pulp storytelling collide.

What ties these books together is not genre so much as pressure. Dunn likes people who are already frayed before the story starts, veterans, drifters, cops, mechanics, damaged families, people with guilt they cannot outtalk. The Ozarks keep returning too, not as postcard scenery but as working ground, full of back roads, old grudges, churches, hidden violence, and communities that remember more than they say. Even when he writes monsters or the supernatural, he stays interested in the human cost, shame, loyalty, survival, and the long afterlife of bad choices.

Later author bios place Dunn in Kansas City, where he continued writing across genres and experimenting with mixed-media art. That restless energy fits the books. By the time he reached The Sound of Distant Engines, he was still changing shape, using near-future fiction to think about war memory, surveillance, aging, and regret. If you like crime and horror that keep one boot in real life, he is a writer worth knowing.