Below is the complete list of Marc Cameron’s Arliss Cutter books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Arliss Cutter Books
About Arliss Cutter
Marc Cameron’s Arliss Cutter series combines crime investigation, fugitive pursuit, protective duty, and wilderness survival across Alaska’s immense and frequently hostile landscape. Cutter is a supervisory deputy United States marshal assigned to the Alaska Fugitive Task Force, but his responsibilities extend well beyond tracking escaped prisoners. The novels involve judicial protection, witness security, prisoner transport, remote investigations, and cooperation with local, state, tribal, and federal authorities. Cameron’s own career in the Marshals Service gives the series an unusually practical understanding of how such assignments unfold when weather, distance, and limited resources disrupt official plans.
Cutter is a former soldier and experienced tracker raised partly in the Florida swamps under the influence of his grandfather, D. Wayne Cutter. He carries himself with the reserve of an old-fashioned Western lawman, relying on patience, observation, and decisive action rather than elaborate speeches. His personal code is summarized through lessons remembered from his grandfather, whom he calls Grumpy. Those rules provide guidance, but they also reveal Cutter’s difficulty expressing emotion without translating it into duty or responsibility.
Deputy Lola Teariki is his principal professional partner. Intelligent, composed, and determined to strengthen her field skills, Lola develops from a less experienced deputy into someone Cutter can trust during increasingly dangerous assignments. Their partnership avoids unnecessary romantic tension and is instead built around mentorship, mutual respect, and the practical intimacy of working beside someone who may have to save your life. Her developing relationship with Anchorage police officer Joe Bill Bracket gives her an independent personal thread beyond her work with Cutter.
Open Carry establishes the series through a cold murder case involving a Tlingit girl and disappearances connected to a reality-television production on Prince of Wales Island. The investigation introduces the series’ characteristic balance: Cutter must understand the human secrets inside a small community while surviving terrain that can conceal both evidence and killers. Stone Cross moves him into a remote Alaska Native village, where threats against a federal judge intersect with disappearances, murder, and long-standing local tensions.
Later books broaden the type of work assigned to Cutter and Lola. Bone Rattle places them around a federal trial entangled with mining interests and the violation of ancient burial sites. Cold Snap separates the partners when a prisoner-transport flight leaves Cutter stranded in the wilderness with violent fugitives, while Lola investigates evidence connected to a serial killer. Breakneck turns a judicial security assignment and an Alaska Railroad journey into a confrontation with organized attackers. These stories repeatedly show that Alaska is not merely dramatic scenery: aircraft, rivers, darkness, extreme cold, wildlife, unreliable communications, and distances between settlements determine what investigators can realistically do.
A longer personal mystery concerns the death of Cutter’s brother, Ethan. Arliss moved to Alaska partly to help Ethan’s widow, Mim, and their children, but unanswered questions gradually suggest that Ethan’s death was not what it appeared. Bad River brings that investigation into the foreground, connecting Alaska with South Dakota and forcing Arliss to confront family history he has approached with characteristic emotional restraint. His feelings for Mim complicate the responsibility he already carries toward his brother’s family.
The family thread continues into Backtrack, the eighth novel, which links a present-day threat against those closest to Arliss with a violent incident involving his grandfather in 1977. Published in July 2026, it deepens the importance of the Cutter family code by showing that inherited loyalties can carry inherited enemies as well.
Each principal case can largely be understood on its own, but publication order preserves Cutter and Lola’s development, the mystery surrounding Ethan, and the changing relationships within Cutter’s household. The series’ distinctive strength lies in joining procedural authenticity with a character who is exceptionally capable in the wilderness yet far less certain when duty requires him to speak honestly about grief, affection, and the family he is trying to protect.