Lewis Cole

About the Lewis Cole series

Lewis Cole writes a magazine column about New Hampshire's Atlantic coastline from a beach house that once belonged to his late partner -- a house he can afford only because of a classified incident from his previous career at a Pentagon-adjacent intelligence job that ended in violence and reassignment. That backstory surfaces only in pieces across the series, and it is what makes Cole different from the usual amateur sleuth: local police in the fictional town of Tyler know he has skills and connections well beyond magazine journalism, and they call on him precisely because he can operate outside procedure. Brendan DuBois builds each novel, from Dead Sand (1994) onward, around a self-contained mystery on or near the Tyler coastline -- a body on the beach, a militia compound, a Cold War secret resurfacing decades later -- narrated in Cole's dry, self-aware first person.

The series has run for three decades with unusually long gaps between some entries (four years between Shattered Shell and Killer Waves, five between Buried Dreams and Primary Storm), but Cole and his New Hampshire setting stay consistent throughout, aging in something close to real time. DuBois, himself a New Hampshire native and Edgar Award finalist, grounds the series in specific, well-observed regional detail -- the tourist economy, the old mill towns, the coastline's mix of wealth and working-class grit -- that has made Lewis Cole one of the more durable regional-mystery series still being actively published, with Terminal Surf arriving a full thirty years after the series began.