Stevens and Windermere Books in Order

The Stevens and Windermere novels follow Minnesota state investigator Kirk Stevens and FBI special agent Carla Windermere as they chase criminals across the United States. Each book gives them a new, self-contained case, but their partnership and personal lives evolve from story to story.

Stevens works for the states Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, based in the Twin Cities. He is a middle-aged, happily married father who has spent years juggling paperwork, politics, and the occasional major case. When the series begins he is more comfortable in a suit than in a tactical vest, but he still has sharp instincts and a strong sense of responsibility to the people caught up in his investigations.

Windermere arrives in his world from the FBI, younger, ambitious, and less patient with rules. She is used to big cases and bigger cities, not small-town departments, and she knows what it means to be a Black woman in mostly white, mostly male law enforcement spaces. The energy between her and Stevens is part friction, part respect, and it grows into a working partnership that neither of them quite expected.

In The Professionals, the pair are thrown together to track four out-of-work college graduates who have turned to kidnapping midlevel executives for modest ransoms. Criminal Enterprise pits them against a laid-off accountant whose first desperate bank robbery turns into a string of increasingly violent heists. In Kill Fee, a public assassination outside a St. Paul hotel exposes a slick murder-for-hire network that connects clients and brainwashed gunmen through an anonymous website.

The Stolen Ones widens the canvas, as a murdered deputy and a terrified young woman with no ID lead Stevens and Windermere into an international trafficking ring and the lives of the women fighting to escape it. The Watcher in the Wall brings the threat even closer to home, when a classmate of Stevenss daughter dies by suicide and the agents uncover an online community that seems to be encouraging vulnerable teens to kill themselves. In The Forgotten Girls, a frozen body beside a remote freight line reveals a killer riding the rails and targeting runaways and drifters no one is looking for.

What ties the series together is the way it blends high-stakes chases with quieter questions about work, family, race, and the cost of chasing monsters for a living.

Readers get both the adrenaline of a modern thriller and the feeling of checking back in with a complicated, evolving team.