Below is the complete list of Jonathan Kellerman’s Petra Connor books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Petra Connor Books
About Petra Connor
Jonathan Kellerman’s Petra Connor books form a short but distinctive branch of his crime fiction, and they work best when understood as a compact spin-off from the wider Alex Delaware world rather than as a massive standalone franchise. Penguin Random House’s official series page lists just two Petra Connor books, Billy Straight and Twisted, while Kellerman’s own site makes clear that Petra is the central figure in both novels.
That small scale is important. Petra is a recurring Los Angeles police presence elsewhere in Kellerman’s fiction, but the Petra Connor line itself is tightly bounded. It is not one of those long detective series where the lead resets for a new case every year. Instead, these two books give Petra the foreground and let readers see what happens when a character who often functions as part of a larger ensemble is allowed to carry the emotional and investigative weight herself.
What makes Petra stand out is that she brings a different energy from Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis. Alex is reflective and psychologically oriented; Milo is dry, seasoned, and institutionally powerful in his own weary way. Petra, by contrast, feels more exposed to the grind and unpredictability of police work at street level. Kellerman’s official Twisted description calls her “complex and wryly compassionate,” which is a good summary of why she works so well at the center of a novel. She is capable and tough, but she also reads as emotionally permeable in a way that gives the books a different texture from the main Delaware line.
Publication order matters because this is a very compact sequence. Billy Straight introduces Petra as the homicide detective desperately searching for a murderer while trying to save a vulnerable runaway in Los Angeles, and that novel does the foundational work of establishing her as a lead rather than a supporting investigator. Twisted then returns to Petra as a Hollywood homicide detective handling a brutal gang killing and a bizarre thread connecting multiple murders. In a two-book series, the first novel effectively defines the entire line, while the second deepens the sense of Petra as a protagonist who can sustain a darker, more personal kind of police thriller.
The Los Angeles setting also matters here. These books are not just urban police stories in a generic sense. Petra’s work unfolds in a city Kellerman knows how to use well: fractured, media-saturated, socially divided, and always capable of turning private damage into public spectacle. Billy Straight especially seems to lean into that city pressure, with the runaway child, media attention, and urban danger all intensifying Petra’s role as investigator and protector at once.
Seen in the context of Kellerman’s larger bibliography, the Petra Connor books are best understood as a short, focused offshoot that reveals another side of his fictional world. They do not try to rival the scale of Alex Delaware. Instead, they offer something narrower and, in some ways, sharper: two crime novels centered on a homicide detective who is fully capable of carrying suspense on her own. Read in publication order, they show why Petra Connor remained memorable enough to deserve her own line, even if that line stayed compact.