What to Read After Rachel Hatch

Rachel Hatch brings an investigator’s training to cases that can become painfully personal. In Drift, her return home after her sister’s death puts those skills to work alongside Sheriff Dalton Savage. If you want another series after Hatch, it helps to decide which part of that combination you want to keep.

Dalton offers a familiar character and a sheriff’s perspective. Maddie Castle brings the work into private investigation and a developing K-9 partnership. Jane Cannon moves the pressure inside federal law enforcement, where the investigator’s own credibility is in question.

Follow a familiar sheriff: Dalton Savage

If you met Dalton through Hatch and wanted more of him, Savage Grounds is the direct next step. He leads his own series, beginning with the disappearance of a young woman from a Colorado hiking trail.

Suspicion falls on her recently paroled ex-boyfriend. As Savage and his team search the mountains, they have to keep testing that first explanation. The landscape is part of the difficulty: this is an investigation where finding someone also means reaching them through dangerous terrain.

Choose Dalton when you want to stay with a character you know and spend more time with a sheriff and his team. His books have their own numbering, starting with Savage Grounds and continuing with Scorched Earth. They do not extend the numbered Hatch list.

Begin with Savage Grounds by L.T. Ryan and Biba Pearce.

See the Dalton Savage reading guide.

Change the working partnership: Maddie Castle

The Handler introduces Maddie after a shooting has ended her police career and killed her K-9 partner. When another handler is murdered, his injured dog draws her back toward the work she knows.

That opening makes professional skill and personal recovery inseparable. Maddie’s investigations take her into Pittsburgh, while working with a dog becomes part of rebuilding a life that has been abruptly changed.

This is a useful choice if Hatch’s competence and personal stakes matter as much to you as the case. The change is in the central partnership and the city-based private-investigation setting. Expect the work of restoring trust to matter alongside the questions surrounding the crime.

Start with The Handler, then continue to Tracking Justice. The separate novella titled Maddie Castle is a prequel.

Begin with The Handler by L.T. Ryan and C.R. Gray.

See the Maddie Castle reading guide.

Put the investigator under suspicion: Jane Cannon

Blind Trust begins with FBI agent Jane Cannon suspended after the death of DEA colleague Dan Simmons. Messages attributed to her have raised questions about her conduct, and she has to revisit the Seattle case behind his death.

For readers who like watching an investigator challenge an accepted explanation, Jane offers another strong route. Here, the evidence threatens the person trying to assess it. Her professional standing and the institution she works for become part of the pressure.

Choose Jane for FBI procedural suspense, corruption, and difficult questions about whom and what to trust. Start with Blind Trust and follow it with Collateral.

Begin with Blind Trust by L.T. Ryan and K.T. Crowe.

See the Jane Cannon reading guide.

Choosing your next case

Dalton is the clearest continuation when a familiar Hatch character is the draw. Maddie is the choice for a different investigative partnership with recovery at its center. Jane makes the investigator’s relationship with her own institution a central problem.

If you’re still finding your place in Hatch’s novels and shorter stories, the Rachel Hatch reading guide keeps those routes together.

Header art: AI-generated editorial illustration of a fictional mountain setting.