SL Stoner Books in Order

S.L. Stoner is the pen name of Susan Stoner, a historical mystery writer whose work grows out of a long connection to Oregon, labor activism, and local history. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1949, she has spent much of her life following the stories that sit behind familiar streets, institutions, and political fights.

Before publishing fiction, Stoner built a career in law. She studied at Portland State University and Marylhurst University, then earned her law degree from the University of Houston in 1988. After returning to Portland, she served as general counsel for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757 from 1991 to 2015.

That background gave her a close view of the everyday work behind organized labor.

Stoner's route to writing also ran through research. While working as a college research assistant, she investigated Portland's first sheriff and found that she loved chasing details through original records. Later, she read about the Flying Squadron, a group of unemployed men who rode the rails in the early 1900s and confronted abusive railroad guards. That piece of history pushed her toward fiction.

She found that she liked writing mysteries just as much as digging through the past.

In 2009, Stoner and her husband, George Slanina, launched a small publishing venture and published Timber Beasts, the first Sage Adair mystery. The novel introduces a turn-of-the-century Portland shaped by timber money, political corruption, rough working conditions, and people trying to push back. Sage Adair works inside that world as a labor operative, while moving easily between wealthy dining rooms and the city's harder edges.

The later books keep widening the map. Land Sharks takes on Portland's practice of shanghaiing men onto ships. Dry Rot follows a carpenter's strike and a murder case in rain-soaked 1902 Portland. In Black Drop, Sage races to stop an attack connected to Theodore Roosevelt's visit to the city. The Mangle, Slow Burn, Bitter Cry, and Unseen continue to build mysteries around working people, public safety, child labor, fire, and life on an Indian reservation.

The books are interested in people who don't have much power but refuse to be ignored.

Stoner draws on real events and people, then creates fictional investigations around them. Her stories return to labor disputes, corruption, racism, environmental damage, and the gap between public respectability and private greed. They also make room for friendship, disguise, humor, and the practical work of getting someone out of trouble.

Her own life has included jobs in bars, casinos, free clinics, and prisoner advocacy, along with community organizing and legal action to protect Portland's historic open reservoirs. Those experiences help explain why ordinary people, rather than polished heroes, sit at the center of her fiction.

She has lived in Southeast Portland with her husband and dogs, and has described time in the Cascade forests, long walks, Tai Chi, and guitar as useful counterweights to research and writing. For Stoner, history isn't a museum piece. It's a record of what people did when they decided things had to change.