John Pellam

About the John Pellam series

John Pellam is a Hollywood location scout — a former stuntman turned scenery-scouting freelancer for film productions — who keeps stumbling into local murders and small-town conspiracies wherever his job sends him. Jeffery Deaver wrote the first two Pellam novels early in his career, before the Lincoln Rhyme series made him a bestseller, under conditions closer to a traditional amateur-detective mystery than the forensic puzzle-boxes he'd later become known for: a likable outsider protagonist whose professional reason for being in town gives Deaver an excuse to drop him into a new location and cast of small-town suspects each time.

After a near-decade gap, Deaver returned to the character for Hell's Kitchen (2001), moving Pellam's world into contemporary New York real-estate corruption. The series is a low-key, character-driven counterpart to Deaver's more elaborate later thrillers, and a good entry point for readers who want his prose and plotting instincts without the full forensic-procedural machinery of Lincoln Rhyme.

How to read this series

Publication order: Shallow Graves (1992), Bloody River Blues (1993), then Hell's Kitchen (2001). Each book is a self-contained mystery in a new location, so the series is friendly to reading in any order, though publication order shows Pellam's world moving from small-town settings toward New York City across the trilogy.