All about Detective Dave Burrows

I just love the love we all have for Detective Dave Burrows. The amount of emails and questions I get about him are amazing.

The most asked question is: what order does he appear in the books.

Well, let me put that to rest, with this post.

Dave came into being when I wrote my first novel Red Dust. I didn’t know then what a lasting character I was going to create. He’s tough, loyal, full of integrity, but he doesn’t mind bending the rules to get the ‘right-justice’ outcome. Indigo Storm is a prime example of that. (I’m not telling you the ending, you’ll have to read it.)

Let me tell you about how the ‘early’ Dave series came into being; I write two books a year. The November published book is always the rural lit type books I started to write first – the ones where there is a strong female lead character, Red Dust had Gemma Sinclair, Blue Skies, Amanda Greenfield, Purple Roads, Anna Butler. You get where I’m going here. Dave features in most of these Rural Lit books, but he is a secondary character – helping solve the cases behind the story, but not in the lead.

When I left the farm, I talked to my publishers about writing two books a year and we felt that two Rural Lit books might be a bit much and at the time, Dave was beginning to get a bit of a following so we decided to take him back to his early days and create a series that put him in as the lead character.

The order for the present day Rural Lit book are:

• Red Dust (Dave Burrows first appearance 2009)
• Blue Skies (2010)
• Purple Roads (Dave Burrows appears briefly 2012)
• Silver Clouds (2013)
• Crimson Dawn (Dave Burrows appears briefly 2014)
• Emerald Springs (Dave Burrows 2015)
• Indigo Storm (Dave Burrows 2016)
• Sapphire Falls (Dave Burrows 2017)
• The Missing Pieces of Us (General Women’s fiction novel 2017)
• Suddenly One Summer (Dave Burrows 2017)
• Where the River Runs (Dave Burrows 2018)
• Starting From Now (Dave Burrows 2019)
• The Shearer’s Wife Dave Burrows 2020)
• Deception Creek (Dave Burrows 2021)
• Broad River Station (Dave Burrows 2022

Even though Dave appears in some of the books above, he isn’t the main character, but they do continue on with his life, from where the previous book finished. However, they’re all stand alone reads.

Growing up on a farm out of Northam in WA, Dave thought he was going to be a farmer. That’s all he wanted. But by some horrible circumstances, when he was in his early 20s, his father kicked him out and he was suddenly left wondering what he was going to do for the rest of this life. You can read about this in The Farmer’s Choice, which is a short story, only an e-book, available from iTunes and a few other places. In this story, you’ll see how Dave and Kim first connected when they were younger and how life threw challenges at Dave he never expected.

The Farmer’s Choice is the first in the ‘Young’ Dave series which are all published in April. In this series the books are:

• Fool’s Gold (2018)
• Without A Doubt (2019)
• Red Dirt Country (2020)
• Something to Hide (2021)
• Rising Dust (2022)
• Into the Night (2023)

Again, even though these are in a series, they are stand alone and able to be read out of order (although you may have some questions.)

In the present day Dave is married to his childhood sweetheart, Kim. In the ‘Young’ Dave series, he’s married to his first wife Melinda, who he divorces later in life. (Interestingly, Dave goes through a divorce around the same time as I did! Write what you know…) Obviously, that isn’t a spoiler as it’s clear that he and Kim are together in later books.

If you’ve got any more questions about the order of the books or Dave himself, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them!