Reading order#
| # |
Title |
Published |
Author |
Buy on Amazon |
| 1 |
Dead Gone |
2016 |
T.J. Brearton |
Buy |
| 2 |
Truth or Dead |
2017 |
T.J. Brearton |
Buy |
| 3 |
Dead or Alive |
2019 |
T.J. Brearton |
Buy |
Dead Gone (2016) launched the Tom Lange series, taking T.J. Brearton’s crime fiction south for the first time. The series is set in southwest Florida, where Special Agent Lange works cases involving the drug trade and organized crime networks that operate along the Gulf Coast — a world of heat, money, and violence quite different from the mountain communities of his Adirondack books.
Truth or Dead (2017) and Dead or Alive (2019) completed the series across three years. The Florida setting proved to be a departure rather than a new home for Brearton’s fiction: his subsequent series work returned to upstate New York environments, and Tom Lange remains the only segment of his career fully located outside the North Country landscape he grew up in.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many books are in the Tom Lange series?
There are three books in the Tom Lange series, published between 2016 and 2019.
What is the first book in the Tom Lange series?
The first book in the Tom Lange series is Dead Gone, published in 2016.
How does the Tom Lange series differ from T.J. Brearton's Adirondack crime fiction?
Where the Titan and North County books are set in the cold, rural Adirondacks, Tom Lange operates in southwest Florida — a deliberate geographic departure that gives the three books a sunlit noir quality distinct from the darker, more isolated upstate New York atmosphere. Drug dealers, organized crime, and the specific underworld of Florida’s Gulf Coast create a setting closer to James Hall or Randy Wayne White than to Brearton’s usual territory. Dead Gone (2016), Truth or Dead (2017), and Dead or Alive (2019) share only the crime fiction genre with the Adirondack series, not the landscape or community texture.