Below is the complete list of Janet Evanovich’s Knight and Moon books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Knight and Moon Books in Publication Order
with Phoef Sutton
- Curious Minds (2016)
(With Phoef Sutton)
Curious Minds was published in 2016 and is listed as book #1 in the Knight and Moon series. - Dangerous Minds (2017)
Published in 2017, Dangerous Minds is listed as book #2 in the Knight and Moon series.
About Knight and Moon
Janet Evanovich’s Knight and Moon series is a short comic mystery-adventure series centered on Emerson Knight and Riley Moon, an unlikely pair whose differences create most of the energy on the page. The series begins with Curious Minds, co-written with Phoef Sutton, and continues with Dangerous Minds. It is lighter, faster, and more caper-driven than a traditional detective series, but it still uses missing money, suspicious deaths, hidden motives, and powerful people behaving badly to keep the plot moving.
Emerson Knight is the kind of character who could easily overpower a story if he were not balanced by someone more grounded. He is wealthy, brilliant, eccentric, and almost completely uninterested in ordinary social rules. His intelligence gives him an advantage in puzzles and danger, but his detachment from normal behavior also makes him difficult, unpredictable, and often unintentionally funny. Evanovich has always enjoyed characters who disrupt polite order, and Emerson fits that tradition in a more intellectual, oddball way.
Riley Moon is the practical counterweight. A recent Harvard Business and Harvard Law graduate, she begins the series working as a junior analyst at Blane-Grunwald, where Emerson is an important client. Riley is ambitious, organized, and determined to prove herself in a professional world that expects discipline and polish. Her first serious encounter with Emerson pulls her into a situation far outside standard finance work, and much of the series’ charm comes from watching her adapt. She is not a passive assistant swept along by a genius. She argues, questions, pushes back, and gradually becomes a true partner in the chaos.
Curious Minds establishes the main dynamic when Riley is sent to deal with Emerson and becomes involved in a mystery tied to missing bank assets and a suspicious disappearance. The setup gives the series its hybrid identity: part financial thriller, part comic mystery, part adventure caper. Evanovich and Sutton use Emerson’s wealth and intelligence to open doors into strange corners of money and power, while Riley’s professional training keeps the story tethered to practical stakes.
Dangerous Minds sends the pair into another unusual investigation, this time involving missing Buddhist monks, a vanished island, and questions that move the series further into adventure territory. The second book shows that Knight and Moon is not designed as a procedural series where the same kind of case repeats. Its appeal comes from flexibility. Emerson and Riley can be pulled into bizarre mysteries because Emerson has the resources and curiosity to chase them, while Riley has the discipline to keep the pursuit from becoming pure madness.
The series is best understood as a two-book comic mystery adventure rather than a long-running, deeply serialized arc. The relationship between Emerson and Riley is the real continuity. Their chemistry is not built only on romance or attraction, but on irritation, fascination, and the gradual recognition that each supplies something the other lacks. Emerson has imagination without much restraint. Riley has structure without much appetite for absurd risk, at least at first.
Knight and Moon sits comfortably beside Evanovich’s other lighter mystery series, but it has its own flavor. It trades Stephanie Plum’s neighborhood chaos for eccentric wealth, global oddities, and puzzle-like capers. The books are breezy, quick, and deliberately improbable, with a central duo whose mismatched skills make the investigations more entertaining than any single mystery solution.