Waterman and Stark Books in Order

The Waterman and Stark thrillers pair two very different women on the front lines of Pacific Northwest crime. Kendall Stark is a sheriff’s detective working the streets and shorelines around Port Orchard, Washington. Birdy Waterman is a forensic pathologist who spends her days in the autopsy suite, listening to what the victims’ bodies have to say.

In Victim Six, the first book in the series, the remains of several young women are found within weeks of each other, all killed with chilling precision. Kendall is struggling to get traction on the case when a local reporter seems to know more than he should, and Birdy’s examinations reveal a killer who is escalating in both confidence and cruelty. The investigation pulls them into the bars, marinas, and wooded inlets of Puget Sound, where almost anyone could disappear.

Closer than Blood shifts the focus to the long shadows of a suspicious car crash from Kendall’s own teenage years. A high‑school reunion brings old classmates—and old resentments—back into the same room. When one of a pair of once‑inseparable twins is found murdered, the other becomes both witness and suspect. With the help of Birdy Waterman, Kendall starts to see a pattern of staged accidents and unreported deaths that may have been building for years.

In The Girl in the Woods, a severed human foot discovered on a school hike sends Birdy and Kendall down a path that feels almost too twisted to be real. A seemingly upstanding family hides ugly secrets, and a manipulative psychopath has learned to weaponize other people’s pain. The companion novella The Bone Box goes back even further, to a killing in Birdy’s own family that still lives on in the box of files she can’t bear to throw away.

Later books draw the two women into a deadly cat‑and‑mouse with charismatic killer Brenda Nevins, whose talent for seduction and manipulation makes her as dangerous in prison as she was outside it. Alongside that arc, titles like Fear Collector spin off to explore other investigators haunted by famous crimes, while still connecting back to the same world of Washington cops, reporters, and forensic experts.

The tone of the series is darker than many regional procedurals. Olsen leans into forensic detail, the politics of small sheriff’s departments, and the emotional toll of seeing so much violence. At the same time, he gives Birdy and Kendall dry humor, complicated families, and a stubborn loyalty to each other that helps keep the books grounded.

If you like to follow the larger story lines—especially the Brenda Nevins cases—start with Victim Six and read forward. Each novel stands alone as a complete hunt for a killer, but together they trace the evolving friendship between a detective who trusts her instincts and a pathologist who trusts the evidence on the table.