Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blood Standard | 2018 | Laird Barron | Buy |
| 2 | Black Mountain | 2019 | Laird Barron | Buy |
| 3 | Worse Angels | 2020 | Laird Barron | Buy |
| 4 | The Wind Began to Howl | 2023 | Laird Barron | Buy |
| 5 | 2026 | Laird Barron | N/A |
The Isaiah Coleridge series marked a sharp turn in Laird Barron’s career. After years of writing cosmic horror short fiction, Barron channeled his love of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald into a hardboiled crime series with Blood Standard in 2018. The books follow Isaiah Coleridge, a big, physically imposing half-Maori man who spent years as a mob enforcer in Alaska. When he interferes with a made man’s scheme, his boss spares his life but ships him off to upstate New York, where he tries to start over.
Coleridge always wanted to be a private eye in the Chandler mold, but his size and his reputation make that difficult. Each novel sends him deeper into the criminal underworld while the supernatural elements that Barron is known for creep in around the edges. Black Mountain (2019) and Worse Angels (2020) leaned harder into that horror crossover, with The Wind Began to Howl (2023) pushing the blend further. Fans of James Ellroy or Joe Lansdale will feel at home here, though Barron brings something distinctly his own to the genre.