How to Start the Evie Blackwell Cold Case Series

The trouble with a two-book series is that it looks like one book with a spare. Nobody at the store stops you. Nobody at the library stops you. You pick up the second one because the cover is the one that caught your eye, you get forty pages in and work out that the detective has a history and a boss and a reason for the frown, and by then you are reading backwards and trying not to admit it. I have done this. More than once. It is the small, entirely avoidable way a good evening goes crooked.

An Evie Blackwell Cold Case is short enough to get right. There are two books. Book one is Traces of Guilt by Dee Henderson, from Bethany House, published in May 2016, 389 pages in paperback. Book two is Threads of Suspicion. That is the entire series, start to finish, and it rewards about fifteen minutes of planning before you open anything. Here is how I would set you up with it if you asked me in the church hallway on a Sunday, which is where most of my book advice gets handed out.

Step 1: Start With Book One, Whatever Talked You Into the Series

The listing labels this one plainly as Book 1 of 2, and the label is doing real work. Traces of Guilt is where the task force is assembled and where Evie Blackwell is introduced as the detective the rest of the series follows. Book two assumes you were there for that. It is not a puzzle you cannot solve out of order, but you will spend the first fifty pages of Threads of Suspicion doing arithmetic that the first book would happily have done for you.

I keep one page per book in a small notebook, and the page for this one has a single line at the top: read February 2025, alone. That is the whole entry. What it does not say, because I did not need to write it down, is that I read it in order, the way Henderson wrote it, and that I was glad of it by the end. A series builds a person across books, and a reader who arrives in the middle spends the whole time catching up instead of settling in.

If you already own book two, put it on the shelf and leave it there until you have finished this one. If you own book one only, that is fine. Read it, then decide. Two books is a small commitment and there is no reason to buy the pair before you know whether the pace suits you. I have handed out a great many books in my working life and I have never once regretted starting a reader at the beginning.

Step 2: Know What Kind of Mystery You Are Picking Up

This is a cold case novel, and the phrase means what it says. The listing describes State Police Detective Evie Blackwell and a new task force reexamining unsolved crimes in Illinois, working old evidence in missing-persons cases in Carin County. That is the engine: files, interviews, and evidence that has been sitting in a box longer than some of the people working it have been on the job. There are no car chases to speak of and nothing that will keep you up checking the locks.

So it is a detective's book rather than a chase, and that distinction decides whether you will enjoy it. If what you want is a woman running from somebody with a clock running in the background, this is not that, and I would hand you If I Run by Terri Blackstock instead, which I finished in two nights flat. If you want the slower satisfaction of a case being taken apart and laid back out by somebody who is good at the work, this is the better fit, and the slowness is the point rather than a flaw.

I will say the honest thing I said to Dottie, who guesses the culprit by page thirty and is usually right: patience is required. I read this one past midnight on a Saturday, which is not my habit at all, but that was one long stretch near the end rather than a fast book all the way through. The first third moves the way a real investigation moves, which is to say it moves like paperwork until it does not.

Step 3: Read With a Pencil Within Reach

Old evidence means names that come back around, and a task force means several cases running alongside one another. I am not going to tell you how they connect, because that is the reading. I will tell you that I kept a pencil in my hand for the middle third of this book, and that I was glad of it, and that this is the most practical piece of advice in the whole article.

My system is not elaborate. A small notebook on the side table, one page per book. When I start, I write the date. If a name comes back after forty pages and I cannot place it, I write it down. If I have to stop in the middle of a chapter, I write the page number. That is all. It costs nothing and it kept me from flipping backward, which is the thing that breaks the spell of a book like this one.

You do not need a notebook. A receipt works. The back of an envelope works. What you need is somewhere to put a name so that you are not holding four of them in your head while also following a detective through a file she has already read twice. I have watched readers give up on good books for no better reason than this, and it is a shame every time.

Step 4: Give the Opening Fifty Pages a Fair Run

Retired librarians are supposed to be neutral and I am not going to pretend. The opening of a cold case novel is setup, and setup is the least exciting part of any investigation. Henderson is building a task force here, and a task force has to be staffed before it can do anything worth reading about. If you judge this book at page twenty you will put it down, and you will have been wrong, and you will never know it.

Fifty pages is my number, and it is not a magic figure, it is just where the work starts to take hold for me. By then I knew whether I wanted to keep going. If you are at page fifty and still reading out of obligation, set it aside and try something else. That is not a failure of the book or of you. It means the pace and the reader did not match, which happens constantly, and the fix is another book rather than a bad mood.

One more thing about that opening. It did not preach at me, and I noticed, because I have put down books that did before the second chapter was out. The faith in it sits in how the people behave rather than in speeches, and if a clean book you can leave on the coffee table is what you have been hunting for, that is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

Step 5: Have Book Two Within Reach Before You Close Book One

The series is two books, and the second is Threads of Suspicion. I have read both, in order, and I would not want to come to the end of the first with nothing on the shelf. The reason is not a cliffhanger, so do not let anybody tell you it is. It is that a cold case series builds a detective across books, and the second one begins with the first one behind it.

Buying both at once is not necessary. Buying the second one before you finish the first is a reasonable middle ground. I did it the slow way, months apart, and I lost a little of the thread doing it. A reader with a better memory than mine will be fine either way and can ignore this whole step.

And if you finish both and want more Henderson, The Negotiator is a different shape of book entirely. I read it once, years ago, and I will keep to a general impression: it moves faster. That is all I will say about it, because I read it once and I am not going to pretend to more than I have.

What Else Helps

Set the book where you actually read. Mine lives on the side table by the green armchair, under the floor lamp, and the reason I finished this one past midnight is that the chair was comfortable, the lamp was on, and the clock was not in my line of sight. A cold case novel is a sitting book. It does not want to be read standing up in a kitchen while something boils on the stove.

If you are in a book group, know what you are bringing. Mine never read this one. Eight women, second Tuesday of the month, and I read Traces of Guilt alone in February 2025 and never put it on the list. That is not a knock on the book. It is a slow, procedural story with a great many moving pieces, and a group that meets once a month will spend the hour reconstructing the file rather than discussing it. If your group has readers who like to talk about how a case is actually worked, it would go well. If your group reads for the ending, hand them something faster.

One last practical note about handing it on. My rule is one page per book, and the bottom line is always who I would give it to. For this one: a patient reader who likes detective work better than chases, who does not mind old evidence and long interviews, and who wants a clean book she can leave on the table when the neighbor drops by. If that is you, start at book one and give it fifty pages. If it is not you, that is useful information too, and it took you less time to find out than a bad fit would have taken to read all the way through.

I started it on a Saturday evening and looked up after midnight. One night, and I am a woman with a nine o'clock habit.