William Ritter Books in Order

If you want his signature supernatural mystery: Jackaby → Beastly Bones → Ghostly Echoes → The Dire King
If you want the follow-up in that same world: Rook
If you're reading with younger fantasy fans: Changeling → The Unready Queen
If you came for Buffy lore: Bloody Fool for Love

William Ritter is an Oregon writer and teacher whose books mix mystery, folklore, monsters, and a dry sense of fun. He studied at the University of Oregon, earned degrees in English and Education, and added certificates in Creative Writing and Folklore along the way. For years he has also taught high school language arts in Oregon, including classes on reading, writing, mythology, and heroes.

That mix of classroom energy and myth-loving curiosity runs through just about everything he writes.

Some of Ritter’s favorite details about himself are the same ones readers tend to remember. He has said his parents raised him to value creativity, intelligence, and individuality, and when they read aloud, they always did the voices. He took that spirit with him to college, where he chose plenty of classes for the story they promised rather than for practical value, including juggling, trampoline, and seventeenth-century Italian longsword. It tells you a lot about his books that this somehow feels exactly right.

Writing seems to have started early and never really stopped. Ritter has written about making little handmade books in first grade, and much later he began Jackaby in the middle of the night while caring for his infant son. He drafted scenes whenever he could, often on a phone after getting the baby back to sleep. He finished the book while living in Okinawa, Japan, and sent queries from there while learning the publishing world as he went. In one especially memorable turn, the manuscript reached agents just as Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, and he later told the story of finding representation during that blackout and aftermath.

It was not a neat-desk, perfect-routine kind of origin story.

The breakthrough was Jackaby in 2014, which became a New York Times bestseller and started his best-known series. Set in 1892 New Fiddleham, the books pair sharp-eyed Abigail Rook with R. F. Jackaby, an investigator who notices the supernatural as easily as other people notice weather. The sequels, Beastly Bones, Ghostly Echoes, and The Dire King, build that world outward with murder cases, folklore creatures, ghost stories, and a bigger struggle between the human world and the magical one. Years later, Rook returned to Abigail and showed that Ritter still had more to do in New Fiddleham.

He did not stay in one lane. With Changeling and The Unready Queen, Ritter turned to younger readers and launched The Oddmire, a middle grade fantasy full of goblins, wild woods, and family secrets. Those books keep the pace quick, but they also spend real time on belonging, prejudice, loyalty, and the question of who gets to decide what makes a family. In 2022, he also stepped into another shared world with Bloody Fool for Love, a Buffy prequel centered on Spike.

Across all of these books, certain patterns keep showing up. Ritter likes outsiders, hidden worlds tucked beside ordinary life, and characters who notice what everyone else misses. He also likes giving spooky premises room for jokes, warmth, and human messiness. Even when the stakes get dark, the stories usually leave space for loyalty, curiosity, and oddball kindness.

He still describes himself as a teacher, a husband, and a father, and that feels like useful context for the work. His novels are adventurous and full of monsters, but they are also deeply interested in empathy, wonder, and what people owe each other.