It's All River City!

 Since the very beginning of writing stories set in River City (RC), I made a point to differentiate between “the main series” and “other works.”

Spoiler alert — this is no longer true. Aside from the Stefan Kopriva mysteries, if something I wrote is set in River City, it is part of the “main series” now.

What am I talking about? Well, up until recently, the “main” RC series was seven books:

These books start in 1994 in Under a Raging Moon and reach 2004 by the end of Dirty Little Town. 

But these weren’t the only stories I wrote that were set in River City. I wrote three standalone novels: Some Degree of Murder, Chisolm’s Debt, and The Trade Off. All three happen in “the future,” at least relative to the main series. They are also a little different in style (one is even co-written with another author). 

And then there are the short story collections. Three books’ worth of stories, all set at various times in the River City timeline, and exploring characters well- or little-known from the main series. These stories stand entirely on their own but many of them fill in information gaps that exist in the main series. 

Probably the best example is Officer Paul Hiero, who is a secondary or even minor character in the main series. His downfall, and the reasons (and secrets) behind it don’t play out in the main series hardly at all. As a reader, you get one of the precipitating events, and you see his friendship with James Kahn. But in the short stories and the standalone books (Some Degree of Murder in particular) you see it all… the big event that accelerates Hiero’s decline, and the big secret behind that event that hardly anyone knows about, as well as a deeper dive into how low Hiero falls…

I always thought this was kind of cool—that the reader of the short stories and the standalones got a more complete picture of the River City timeline. But once the main series caught up to the first of the standalone novels (and many of the short stories), I started to rethink things. Thanks to a conversation with a writer friend, I made the decision to rework the order River City series. The first seven books remain as the first seven, but I inserted the three standalone novels and the short story collections in chronological order (or as close as possible, where the short stories are concerned). 

The River City Series now looks like this:

You’ll notice that there are some placeholder covers. Those are there to keep the chronology clear. Over the next two years, those placeholders will be replaced with new releases.

I think I made the right decision to pull all of these works together under one banner. More readers will check out those titles that weren’t in the main series before, and get a more complete picture of the world I’ve created that is River City.

The only exception is the Stefan Kopriva mysteries. These take place in River City and have a lot of overlapping characters but since these are a completely different subgenre (private investigor rather than police procedural), I kept these books separate… for now. 

What do you think? Should I include Kopriva in the RC series, or keep it separate?

Source: All The Madness In My Soul