Simon Snow Books in Order

If you want the full-length crime novel first: Devil's Apple
If you want the linked small-town trilogy: Deep Red → Stiff Drinks → Skinny Dip
If you want the short companion pieces after that: Road Trip: Book 1 → Road Trip: Book 2
If you want the broadest view of his work: Devil's Apple → Deep Red

Simon Snow was born in England and moved to New Zealand when he was eight, growing up in Dunedin. That early shift matters when you read him. His books are full of people who live a little off the map, and of landscapes that feel beautiful, rough, and quietly unforgiving.

He studied English literature and earned an MA with honours, but he did not head into a neat academic or office life. He chose something more self-sufficient instead. Over the years he worked as a small farmer, slaughterman, bushman, possum trapper, commercial fisherman, whitebaiter and teacher, jobs that put him close to weather, manual work, and isolated communities. It is not a polished list of credentials, and that is part of what makes his fiction feel lived in.

That background shows up on the page.

Snow's first novel, Devil's Apple, was published in 2003. Set on New Zealand's West Coast, it follows George Todman, a recluse drawn into a murder investigation after the death of a young woman named Rainbow. Readers who come to Snow for crime fiction usually start there, because the book brings together several of his strengths at once, strong sense of place, hard-edged local characters, and danger that grows out of old grudges and private histories.

After that first novel, there was a long gap. His next completed work, Men of the Trees, was serialised in a Christchurch newspaper over the 2007-2008 summer. When he returned to book publishing later on, he did it in shorter form, with Deep Red, Stiff Drinks, Skinny Dip, and then the two-part Road Trip sequence. Those later books show the same interest in tension and uneasy communities, just in a more compact frame.

He doesn't write from a polished distance.

Across the books, Snow seems drawn to outsiders, recluses, tough locals, and people who know how fast a closed community can turn suspicious. In Devil's Apple, the mystery grows out of mistrust, logging feuds, rumours, prejudice, and the feeling that everyone knows something but no one says it plainly. In the Deep Red books, the frame gets smaller, a man in a small town, new connections, rivalry, and finally a strange death, but the pressure stays just as sharp.

The land is never just background in his fiction. Bush, rivers, coast, mountains, and small settlements all shape the stories. People hide in them, work in them, get worn down by them, and sometimes reveal themselves because of them. Snow has described the mountains and the bush as lasting passions, and that feels true of the work. The setting is not there to look nice. It changes what the characters can do, what they fear, and how far trouble can travel.

Biographical notes around his books describe a self-sufficient rural life with his wife, Adelaide, and their four sons, and place him near Geraldine on New Zealand's South Island. That rural pull feels central to everything he writes. Even when the plot moves toward crime, suspicion, or personal conflict, there is usually a strong sense of ordinary labour underneath it, fishing, farming, teaching, getting by, keeping to yourself, and knowing the weather matters.

What readers tend to remember is not polish for its own sake. It is the mix of stripped-back storytelling and vivid place. Snow's books are interested in what happens when private longing, local rivalry, and trouble in the bush or back roads stop being private at all.