Where to Start with the Gripping Cases of Iris Johansen

In the first of the Eve Duncan series, Eve Duncan has gone through every parent’s worst nightmare. Her daughter was kidnapped by a serial killer who went to his grave without disclosing where the young girl’s body lay hidden.

Eve has thrown herself into her work as a forensic sculptor to help reconstruct and identify skulls. She ends up getting approached by a billionaire who desperately wants her help.

When he gives her an offer she can’t refuse, she finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that puts her skills and life to the test.

And once you get hooked on this series, you are in luck. There are 31 books so far; The Death Mask came out in 2025.

In this standalone novel, Allie Girard has a wonderful life and loves her family. But you can’t outrun your past forever.

One day, Allie is found out; she’s really Teresa Casali, the daughter of a mob boss with a special ability: she can read people’s memories, which her family exploits for profit and murder.

When she decides to leave her blood spattered life behind, she finds an unexpected ally, Andre Mandak, who helps her get away and into witness protection. He also helps her figure out how to manage her special ability, until he needs her to repay the debt she owes him.

With everything on the line, Allie isn’t going to go down easy. She’s going to do everything to protect her family.

A spin-off series from the Eve Duncan series, this is the second book in the Catherine Ling series.

Life hasn’t been kind to Catherine. She was orphaned and abandoned in Hong Kong, but  rescued by a man named Hu Chang who trained her until she was recruited by the CIA.

Years later, she had a son who was kidnapped at the age of two. Thankfully, he came back to her seven years later, alive.

However, she learns that her old mentor made an untraceable poison that many unsavory elements want in their wheelhouse. Now she has to save her mentor and protect her child from these new threat—and prevent this poison from being released into the world.

As a member of the CIA, Catherine Ling knows she has made a lot of enemies in her life.

But now someone is keen on making her pay; they are killing people around Catherine, including the people who saved her life when she was an orphan on the streets of Hong Kong.

She has an impossible task: protect the people who have touched her life and find out which sadistic villain is behind these murderers.

It’s the fourth in the Catherine Ling series.

In the fifth Catherine Ling book, Catherine is on a mission to protect Rachel, the daughter of Carl Venable, the head of the CIA task force. It’s Carl’s dying wish to CIA agent Jude Brandon.

But keeping Rachel safe won’t be easy. She has her own skeletons in the closet, and her own vendetta against Max, who killed her father.

Now they have an impossible task—stop Max from detonating a nuclear bomb on the west coast of the US.

But everyone has their own desire for revenge. Will Catherine be able to keep Rachel alive and protect the US from a nuclear explosion?

This one features Sarah Patrick and her golden retriever, Monty, who are a bonded search and rescue team.

Sarah is strong-armed into helping billionaire John Logan find a missing scientist in Columbia. But it’s no easy task; the man who kidnapped the scientist is a brutal killer and wants to avenge himself on Logan.

Now she has to use all of her talents to find the scientist, protect Logan, and keep herself and Monty alive.

This is technically the third book in the Eve Duncan series, but Eve plays a secondary role.

Written with Iris' son, Roy Johansen, this book focuses on FBI agent Kendra Michaels.

For 20 years, Kendra was blind. However, she trained herself to use her other sense—hearing, smell, and touch—to give her seemingly superhuman abilities.

And now she’s able to see due to a revolutionary surgery.

When she's presented with a troubling case involving several murders, she finds the list of victims includes the name of her ex-lover who disappeared. While she doesn’t want to get involved, she can’t turn away.

There are 10 books in the Kendra Michaels series.

This one is another one for fans of human and dog teams.

Kira Drake and her Golden Retriever, Mack, are popular amongst law enforcement agencies around the world. Now they’re looking to find the person responsible for bombing a museum in Paris.

But Kira’s not the only one who wants to find the terrorist behind the attack that killed 200 people.

Billionaire Jack Harlan has always wanted to find the man behind his brother’s death. When he learns that the terrorist of the Parisian attack is the same man who killed his brother, he convinces Kira that she should help him find the killer.

Despite her misgivings, she agrees. But she may find that there’s more at stake than she had previously thought…