Quincy & Rainie

About the Quincy & Rainie series

Pierce Quincy is a retired FBI profiler with a gift for reconstructing the minds of violent offenders, and Rainie Conner is the hard-drinking small-town Oregon detective he falls for while investigating a shocking school shooting. This is Lisa Gardner's series before D.D. Warren, opening with The Perfect Husband, in which a woman who once survived her serial-killer ex-husband learns he's escaped custody and coming for her — Quincy consults on the case as her protector as much as her profiler. From The Third Victim onward, Quincy and Rainie work cases together as a couple as often as separately, their relationship complicated by his estranged daughter and her troubled past, giving the series a sustained emotional arc alongside each book's investigation.

Gardner's research-heavy approach to criminal psychology and victim trauma is fully formed by this series — Gone is told partly from the perspective of an abduction victim, and Say Goodbye follows a predator specifically targeting streetwalkers nobody is looking for. After a near-decade gap, Right Behind You returns to the couple through the eyes of Rainie's adopted daughter Sharlah, whose brother resurfaces after a mass shooting years earlier. Two later crossover novels, Never Tell (2019) and When You See Me (2020), bring Quincy and Rainie into direct contact with D.D. Warren's Boston cases; because Warren is the lead investigator in both, this site catalogues them under the D.D. Warren series rather than here.

This is the series for readers who want Gardner's psychological intensity with an established, slow-burn central relationship rather than the solo-investigator format of D.D. Warren or Frankie Elkin.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Perfect Husband (1997). Quincy and Rainie's relationship — how they meet, get together, and navigate his adult daughter and her own history — develops continuously across the first six books, so reading in order matters more here than in Gardner's other series. There's a nine-year gap between Say Goodbye (2008) and Right Behind You (2017), which shifts focus to Rainie's adopted daughter Sharlah rather than the original pair, so it can be read as a soft follow-up rather than a direct continuation. Readers who finish Right Behind You and want to keep following Quincy and Rainie should move on to Never Tell (2019) and When You See Me (2020), catalogued under this site's D.D. Warren series, where the couple appear as major supporting characters in Boston Detective D.D. Warren's cases.