Below is the complete list of Joe Ide’s IQ books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of IQ Books
About IQ
Joe Ide’s IQ series follows Isaiah Quintabe, a brilliant and unconventional investigator working in and around East Long Beach, Los Angeles. Nicknamed IQ for both his initials and extraordinary intelligence, Isaiah approaches crime through observation, deduction, experimentation, and an ability to notice details other people dismiss. The obvious inspiration is Sherlock Holmes, but Ide places that tradition inside a contemporary Los Angeles shaped by race, poverty, gangs, celebrity, money, and communities whose problems may receive little attention from conventional institutions. Six novels have been published, from IQ through Fixit.
IQ establishes Isaiah as an unofficial neighborhood detective. People seek him out when the police cannot or will not solve their problems, sometimes paying him with whatever they can afford rather than conventional fees. His analytical personality contrasts sharply with Juanell Dodson, an energetic former hustler whose instincts are commercial, social, and streetwise. Their mismatched partnership becomes one of the series’ most important relationships.
Isaiah’s intelligence does not protect him from the unresolved trauma defining his life. His older brother Marcus was killed years earlier, and discovering who was responsible becomes an increasingly consuming objective. Righteous pushes that mystery forward while sending Isaiah and Dodson to Las Vegas on another dangerous case. The search ultimately brings Isaiah closer to the person behind Marcus’s death, giving the second novel a much more personal stake than a conventional follow-up investigation.
By Wrecked, Isaiah’s success has made him increasingly recognizable in his own community. Dodson wants to transform their informal investigations into a legitimate private-investigation business, while Isaiah remains much less interested in publicity or commercial success. A young artist searching for her missing mother draws them into a case connected with a dangerous paramilitary operation and an adversary capable of challenging Isaiah on a level he has rarely encountered.
Hi Five gives Ide one of his most unusual investigative structures. Isaiah is coerced into proving the innocence of Christiana, the daughter of a powerful arms dealer, after her boyfriend is murdered. Christiana has multiple personalities, and no single personality possesses the entire memory of what happened. Isaiah must therefore reconstruct the crime from fragmented accounts while protecting Grace, whose safety is being used to force his cooperation.
The consequences carry directly into Smoke. Injured, hunted, and psychologically exhausted, Isaiah leaves Los Angeles and hides in Northern California. Even there he cannot stop investigating when a young man asks for help identifying a prolific serial killer. Dodson simultaneously faces dangerous problems of his own, making the novel one of the clearest demonstrations that the two friends’ lives have become inseparable from the violence surrounding their work.
Fixit returns Isaiah to perhaps his most personal crisis when professional hitman Skip Hanson kidnaps Grace in revenge for what Isaiah has done to him. Isaiah and Dodson reunite to track her across Los Angeles while homicide detective Winnie Hando pursues the same case and regards Isaiah’s interference as a liability. Published in 2023, Fixit remains the sixth and most recent IQ novel as of 2026.
The series becomes increasingly interconnected as it progresses. Marcus’s death, Isaiah’s relationship with Grace, Dodson’s evolution from hustler to genuine partner, and the consequences of earlier enemies all continue beyond individual cases. Ide’s most distinctive achievement is therefore not simply creating a modern Sherlock Holmes. Isaiah’s intellect may solve puzzles, but the novels steadily force him to confront something deduction cannot easily manage: the emotional cost of becoming responsible for everyone who believes he can save them.