Who doesn’t love Seattle – we’ve all been sleepless there in person or onscreen, those Pike Street Markets, the majestic Pacific… a big city, but never quite feeling like a crowded city. What could possibly go wrong in such a seemingly calm, placid metropolis? Somehow crime writers always find trouble… so many good books set in Seattle, so this Crime and the City is a bit of a romp through as many as possible…
Let’s start with a little history, a little neo-noir – Robert Dugoni’s A Killing on the Hill (2024). Seattle, 1933 and it’s the Great Depression, and, if things weren’t tough enough, Prohibition. Ambitious young reporter William “Shoe” Shumacher gets a tip that could change his career. There’s been a murder at a social club on Profanity Hill—an underworld magnet for vice crimes only a privileged few can afford. The story is going to be front-page news, and Shoe is the first reporter on the scene. Dugoni is a Seattle writer and journalist – hIs nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary (2004) was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
Dugoni is also the author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series set in Seattle, which has sold more than 10 million books worldwide. The Tracy Crosswhite series comprises a dozen books. We meet Terry in My Sister’s Grave (2014) when she has spent 20 years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah’s disappearance in her hometown in the northern Cascade mountains and the murder trial that followed. She doesn’t believe that Edmund House—a convicted rapist and the man condemned for Sarah’s murder—is the guilty party. Motivated by the opportunity to obtain real justice, Tracy has become a homicide detective with the Seattle PD and dedicated her life to tracking down killers. In subsequent books Terry investigates a serial killer killing young women in cheap motels in North Seattle, a cold case involving the suspicious suicide of a Native American high school girl, bodies in Puget Sound, drugs on a local naval base and we get to meet her colleague on the Seattle PD, Vic Fazzio. The series is currently at 12 books, but more Terry Crosswhite is apparently to come.
Some more Seattle crime:
- Nathan Ripley’s Find You in the Dark (2018) follows Martin Reese, a man who digs up murder victims, buys stolen police files on serial killers, and uses them to taunt the police for their failure to do their job. Detective Sandra Whittal doesn’t think that’s a fun hobby!
- Cherie Priest’s Grave Reservations (2021) features Leda Foley: devoted friend, struggling travel agent, and inconsistent psychic. When Leda, sole proprietor of Foley’s Flights of Fancy, impulsively re-books Seattle PD detective Grady Merritt’s flight, her life changes in ways she couldn’t have predicted. Features some great descriptions of Seattle’s nighttime bar life!
- Rob Osler’s Cirque du Slay (2024) is quirkily different. Seattle middle school teacher and gay dating blogger Hayden McCall and his best friend Hollister are invited to a fundraiser for Bakers Without Borders. The celebrity performer, Kennedy Osaka, is the artistic director of Mysterium, an upscale circus arts show combining magic, acrobatics, and a Michelin-star dinner. But Kennedy is a no-show—until she’s found dead in her hotel suite. And so Hayden and Hollister become with LGBTQ+ amateur sleuths.
- Alexandra Oliva’s Forget me Not (2022). As a child sees a woman living in Seattle with a complicated past back in Washington State. When a fire at her childhood home hits the news she is forced to confront her past unleashing a chain of events that will not only endanger her life but challenge her understanding of family, memory, and the world itself.
David Guterson’s The Final Case (2022) takes place around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. A girl dies one late, rainy night a few feet from the back door of her home. The girl, Abeba, was born in Ethiopia. Her adoptive parents, Delvin and Betsy Harvey—conservative, white fundamentalist Christians—are charged with her murder. Royal, a Seattle criminal attorney in the last days of his long career, takes Betsy Harvey’s case. An octogenarian without a driver’s license, he leans on his son—the novel’s narrator—as he prepares for trial. Guterson, from Seattle, is of course best known for his mega-hit Snow Falling on Cedars (1994, and the subsequent movie), about the Japanese community and the wartime internment camps in the Pacific Northwest.
And finally, a terrific series of a dozen books set mostly in Seattle. GM Ford’s heavy drinking Seattle PI Leo Waterman series. I’ll jump around to note a few especially good entrants in the series. For instance, Who is the Hell is Wanda Fuca? (2012). When an old gangster friend of Leo’s father makes a request he “can’t refuse,” Leo and his band of fellow drunks, delve into the world of environmental politics (very Seattle!). Slow Burn (2012) sees Leo caught up in Seattle’s restaurant wars while Salvation Lake (2016) takes him across the city from a downtown homeless encampment to suburban McMansions to the shores of Salvation Lake. Waterman meets them all – organised crime, white supremacists, local drug dealers…. Read all 12 and you’ll know the lowlife and underbelly of Seattle pretty well!
BTW: Ford is also the author of The Frank Corso series about a journalist-turned-writer with a heart of ice. They’re a little darker and more investigative than the Leo Waterman series, but equally all Seattle. The first novel in the series is Fury (2001) – Frank Corso is a difficult man surviving on the substantial royalties from a bestselling book and on his pay for the occasional column in a local tabloid, the Seattle Sun. Yet it’s Corso whom the slow and sheltered Leanne Samples asks for when she walks into the Sun offices and announces that her courtroom testimony, which put Walter Leroy Himes on Death Row, was a lie. There are six books in the Frank Corso series and they’re all super readable and take you yet another trawl through the bowels of Seattle.
Apparently, Seattle has a lot of readers. It certainly has a lot of great indie bookstores. I don’t know if it’s all that supposed rain that hits the city and keeps everyone inside reading? But whatever the cause, one element must be the excellent array of local crime fiction.
