Still Waters Books in Order

The Still Waters series is a Port St. Joe suspense series by Dawn Lee McKenna and Axel Blackwell. It shares the same Gulf Coast feel as McKenna’s Forgotten Coast books, but it has its own lead, its own town, and a slightly more procedural shape. The books follow Evan Caldwell, a lawman who comes to the Panhandle hoping for quiet and gets almost none of it.

Evan is already in deep water when the series begins. His wife has been left comatose after an accident, and the unanswered questions around that accident sit in the back of his mind every day. He moves onto a boat in Port St. Joe and takes work as an investigator with the local sheriff’s office, trying to build a smaller life that he might actually survive.

Then the sheriff is murdered.

In Dead Reckoning, Evan is pushed into the role of interim sheriff while he investigates the killing of his former boss. The case leads him into swampy secrets, local politics, and doubts about what really happened in his own marriage. That mix of professional duty and personal grief becomes the spine of the series.

Dead Center keeps Evan in Port St. Joe, now dealing with the stabbing death of Jake Bellamy, an insurance agent and father who does not seem to have the kind of enemies who get a man killed in a park. When another killing follows, Evan has to sort through motive, fear, and public pressure before the town loses its sense of safety altogether.

By Dead and Gone, the series has settled into its rhythm: dark cases, dry humor, and coastal people who may look harmless until they are not. A call about missing shrubbery turns into a homicide, the medical examiner disappears, and Evan has to manage two deaths along with county politics, a sharp defense attorney, and the everyday strangeness of small-town law enforcement.

It is a quieter series, but not a sleepy one.

Readers who like McKenna’s character work will find plenty here: wounded people, reluctant responsibility, awkward loyalty, and jokes that land because the situation is already bad. Still Waters is a good next stop after Forgotten Coast, especially for readers who want another Gulf Coast setting with a male lead, a steady police mystery structure, and the same sense that the past is never as far away as people pretend.