The Misadventures of Imogene Taylor Books in Order

The Misadventures of Imogene Taylor is David Putnam in a different key. The series still has crime, danger, and people who know how the system works, but the center of gravity is a seventy-five-year-old woman on parole for murder. Imogene Taylor is not polished, patient, or remotely interested in acting her age. She wants a quiet life, her cigarettes, and a place to sit. Trouble keeps showing up anyway.

Imogene is the opposite of a neat amateur sleuth.

The books start in 1973, long after the act that sent her to prison for killing her husband Wayne. Imogene says it was an accident. The court disagreed. Now she is out, working small jobs and trying not to give her parole officer any excuse to send her back. That one fact changes the whole rhythm of the series. When a body turns up, or gangsters start circling, or a scheme begins to smell wrong, Imogene cannot simply march into a police station and explain. Her past is always in the room with her.

That makes the stories funnier, and tenser, than they first appear. In The Blind Devotion of Imogene, she gets tangled up with protection rackets, a dead woman hidden in a neighbor's garage, a publisher looking for the unknown author of a manuscript, and a family mystery that refuses to stay buried. In Imogene's Grand Fiasco, a new job at a pawn shop drops her into a criminal plan involving mobsters, dirty cops, blackmail, and a Fourth of July bank robbery. The problems pile up fast, and Imogene handles them with the kind of practical nerve that can look reckless from the outside.

She is old, armed, tired, and absolutely not harmless.

The period setting helps a lot. These books feel lived in, from strip malls and bargain stores to pawn shops, garages, cheap cigarettes, and small-town routines. Putnam uses that everyday world well. The crimes do not happen in glamorous places. They grow out of ordinary corners where lonely people, greedy people, and desperate people cross paths. Imogene moves through it all with prison-honed instincts, a hard tongue, and a deep understanding of how fast one bad choice can become five.

There is also more heart here than the title first suggests. Imogene may grumble through almost everything, but she is not empty. She helps neighbors. She notices who is vulnerable. She carries grief, stubborn loyalty, and a rough sense of decency under all that smoke and sarcasm. The tension across the series comes from watching her try to stay free while also refusing to look away when someone nearby is in real trouble.

If you like your crime fiction darkly funny, character-led, and a little scruffy around the edges, this series is easy to warm to. Imogene is a terrific engine for chaos because she is both believable and unpredictable. She has already survived prison, loss, and old age in a world that does not make much room for soft landings. That gives every new mess some extra bite.