Rory Moore/Lane Phillips Books in Order

The Rory Moore/Lane Phillips novels follow a forensic reconstructionist and a criminal profiler who step into cases when the evidence is old, messy, or seemingly exhausted. Together, they specialize in crimes that were never fully understood the first time around.

Rory Moore lives in Chicago and works closely with detectives, rebuilding homicides from photographs, reports, and the smallest overlooked details. She is socially awkward, intensely observant, and happiest when she can take a puzzle apart in a quiet room. What other people see as quirks—her need for routine, her discomfort with small talk—often become strengths when she is immersed in a case.

In Some Choose Darkness, Rory is pulled out of her careful routines when her father, a defense attorney, dies and leaves behind a cryptic file. The case tracks back to the summer of 1979, when five women disappeared from Chicago and a predator known only as The Thief terrified the city. A woman named Angela Mitchell dug into the pattern on her own and then vanished, and decades later The Thief is about to be paroled. Rory’s job is to reconstruct Angela’s last days and decide whether justice was ever truly served.

The past never stays neatly buried in this series.

The second book, The Suicide House, moves Rory and Lane to Indiana, where an elite boarding school hides a particularly ugly secret. An abandoned boarding house just beyond the grounds became the site of a brutal double murder, followed by a string of apparent student suicides. A hit true‑crime podcast has turned the story into a national obsession, but key questions remain: what really happened that night, and why do survivors keep returning to die?

Rory and Lane are brought in to recreate the events for the podcast and to offer a fresh investigative angle. Lane, a psychologist and former FBI profiler, studies the behaviors and histories of everyone connected to the case, while Rory rebuilds the timeline from physical and forensic scraps. Their work forces them to confront secret societies, dangerous campus traditions, and the long shadow of trauma on young people who were told to keep quiet.

Across both novels, readers can expect layered timelines, intricate plotting, and an emphasis on how specialized skills—profiling, reconstruction, and careful research—can illuminate crimes others have given up on. The tone is dark but not gratuitous, with Midwestern landscapes, abandoned buildings, and cold case files providing a steady sense of unease. While each book tells a complete story, starting with Some Choose Darkness before The Suicide House gives the best view of Rory and Lane’s evolving partnership.