Below is the complete list of Michael Brandman books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Buddy Steel Books
Publication Order of Jesse Stone Books
About Michael Brandman
Michael Brandman is an American crime novelist, screenwriter, and film and television producer whose writing career is closely connected with Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone universe. Long before he began publishing continuation novels, Brandman had spent years adapting Parker’s work for television alongside Tom Selleck. That unusually direct involvement with the character helped lead to his selection to continue the Jesse Stone novels after Parker’s death. Brandman later created his own California lawman, Buddy Steel, establishing a separate mystery series built around family tension, small-town policing, and contemporary crime.
Brandman’s career was initially concentrated in film and television rather than novels. He has produced more than thirty motion pictures and television projects, working across literary adaptations, drama, and Westerns. Among his notable productions was Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He also produced television adaptations of major stage works, including Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion.
His association with Tom Selleck became particularly important. Together they produced Western adaptations including Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River, Jack Schaefer’s Monte Walsh, and Louis L’Amour’s Crossfire Trail. Their partnership eventually extended to the television films starring Selleck as Jesse Stone, the troubled police chief created by Robert B. Parker.
Brandman worked closely with Parker on those adaptations, co-writing screenplays including Stone Cold, No Remorse, and Innocents Lost and supervising adaptations of Night Passage, Death in Paradise, and Sea Change. The television version of Jesse consequently gave Brandman years of experience with Parker’s characters, understated dialogue, and fictional town of Paradise, Massachusetts.
After Parker died in 2010, Brandman became the first writer entrusted with continuing the Jesse Stone novels. His Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues appeared in 2011, followed by Fool Me Twice and Damned If You Do. All three became New York Times bestsellers. Rather than attempting to reinvent Jesse, Brandman retained the character’s laconic manner, complicated personal life, and methodical approach to policing. The series subsequently passed to other continuation writers, including Reed Farrel Coleman, Mike Lupica, and Christopher Farnsworth.
Brandman later developed a crime protagonist entirely his own. The Buddy Steel mysteries center on Burton “Buddy” Steel Jr., an LAPD homicide detective who returns to the fictional coastal community of Freedom, California, after his father—the longtime sheriff of San Remo County—is diagnosed with ALS. Their difficult father-son relationship gives the series a personal framework beneath its investigations.
The revised edition of Missing Persons established Buddy’s return home, while One on One, Wild Card, Risk Factor, and Death Threat broadened his cases from local murder and corruption to cybercrime, cartels, and cross-border danger. The shorter work Stealth also features Buddy. Brandman’s screenwriting background is evident in the series’ economical scenes, rapid dialogue, and strong emphasis on investigative movement.
Brandman lives in Los Angeles and is married to Emmy-winning actress Joanna Miles. His bibliography is considerably smaller than that of Parker, but it occupies an unusual intersection between television adaptation and crime fiction. Few continuation writers arrived with such extensive firsthand experience of the character they inherited, while Buddy Steel allowed Brandman to take the concise police storytelling he had refined through Jesse Stone and build a crime world governed entirely by his own characters.