Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Under Cover of Daylight | 1987 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 2 | Tropical Freeze | 1989 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 3 | Mean High Tide | 1994 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 4 | Gone Wild | 1995 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 5 | Buzz Cut | 1996 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 6 | Red Sky at Night | 1997 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 7 | Blackwater Sound | 2002 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 8 | Off the Chart | 2003 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 9 | Magic City | 2007 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 10 | Hell’s Bay | 2008 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 11 | Silencer | 2009 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 12 | Dead Last | 2011 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 13 | Going Dark | 2013 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 14 | The Big Finish | 2014 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 15 | Bad Axe | 2020 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 16 | Trickster | 2022 | James W. Hall | Buy |
| 17 | Stare Down | 2024 | James W. Hall | Buy |
The Thorn series runs seventeen novels following a man who wants to be left alone in the Florida Keys but whose conscience and circumstances won’t allow it. Thorn ties bonefish flies in Key Largo and keeps getting pulled into violent conflicts involving smugglers, poachers, corrupt developers, and worse. Under Cover of Daylight starts the series in 1987, and Stare Down continues it in 2024.
Hall uses the Florida setting — the Keys, the Everglades, Miami — as more than backdrop. The landscape shapes the crimes and the characters, and the series captures both the beauty and the rot of South Florida across nearly four decades of fiction.