
David Trevellyan
espionage thriller
Series · thriller
The Oak Knoll series by Tami Hoag has 3 books and is best read in publication order, starting with Deeper Than the Dead (2009).
Start here: Deeper Than the Dead (2009) — then read straight through in publication order.
The order the books were released — the default way to read the series.
Set in the small California town of Oak Knoll in 1985, this trilogy follows sheriff's detective Anne Leone (later Navarre) and a rotating cast of local investigators across a series of interconnected crimes against children and teenagers. Deeper Than the Dead (2009) opens with the discovery of a young woman's body by four schoolchildren, kicking off an investigation into a serial predator preying on the town; Secrets to the Grave (2010) and Down the Darkest Road (2011) continue directly from the fallout of that first case, with the trilogy building toward the unmasking of a killer whose identity has been hiding in plain sight across all three books.
Unlike Hoag's other multi-book series, Oak Knoll was conceived and executed as a genuine trilogy with a single overarching mystery, closer in structure to Greg Iles's Natchez Burning trilogy than to her more loosely connected detective series.
Three: Deeper Than the Dead (2009), Secrets to the Grave (2010), and Down the Darkest Road (2011), forming a complete trilogy.
No -- it's a fictional Southern California town invented for this trilogy.
Reading order last verified .