Robert Pobi Books in Order

If you want the Lucas Page books: City of Windows → Under Pressure → Do No Harm
If you want his darkest serial-killer setup: Bloodman / Eye of the Storm
If you want grief, small-town dread, and a monster story: Mannheim Rex
If you want a hard-edged New York standalone: American Woman / Harvest / River of the Dead

Robert Pobi was born in Montreal and raised in a very artistic family. His grandfather was a professional painter, and Pobi has said that art was part of everyday life on both sides of the family. That mix of beauty, obsession, and commerce would later show up all through his fiction.

Before novels took over, he spent about fifteen years in the antiques trade, dealing in eighteenth-century formal furniture. The job gave him an eye for rooms, objects, textures, and the strange ways taste and money shape each other. It also taught him the business side of art, which helps explain why painters, collectors, houses, and hidden histories keep turning up in his books.

Writing was there first.

Pobi has said he wrote from childhood and filled drawers with unpublished manuscripts while his business carried on. The move to writing full time came after a brutal stretch in his personal life, when his best friend died of cancer, a lifelong friend was murdered, and an employee he cared about also died of cancer. That run of losses forced a reckoning. He left his old life behind, moved to the country, and decided to stop playing it safe.

Bloodman, later republished as Eye of the Storm, was the novel that introduced many readers to his work. It sends FBI consultant Jake Cole back to Montauk, where family history, serial murder, and a looming hurricane all crash together. Readers who click with Pobi tend to like that kind of pressure-cooker setup, damaged people, ugly crimes, and a setting that feels like it might break apart before the case does.

He does not stay in one lane for long.

In Mannheim Rex, he swerved toward monster-story suspense, following grieving horror writer Gavin Corlie to a lonely lake house and then letting something huge move beneath the water. Pobi has said the idea came from a three a.m. swim near his cabin, which feels very on brand. American Woman goes back to New York and follows homicide detective Alexandra Hemingway through a heat wave, a serial killer case, and a city that seems ready to boil over.

Later came the Lucas Page novels, beginning with City of Windows and continuing with Under Pressure and Do No Harm. Lucas is an astrophysicist, professor, former FBI agent, husband, father, and reluctant investigator who sees patterns other people miss. He is also living with catastrophic injuries from an earlier explosion, which makes him less of a wish-fulfillment hero and more of a sharp, difficult human being trying to keep up with his own mind.

Across the books, some things keep returning. Pobi likes violent weather, ticking clocks, isolated places, broken investigators, and villains who leave just enough order inside the chaos for the right person to spot it. He can move from serial-killer darkness to creature-feature menace to big-city procedural, but the pressure is always there. So is the sense that intelligence can be a gift and a burden at the same time.

These days he still seems happiest a little off the grid. He spends much of the warmer part of the year at a cabin on a lake in the mountains, with no phone, internet, or television, and when he needs email he drives into town for wifi. When cold weather sets in, he heads for a place by the beach. He keeps notes in composition books, likes fountain pens, avoids social media, and has said he does not even own a cell phone.