Originally, the order of my novels was Montana Harvest, Mystery at Little Bitterroot, and The Killing Zone and the original timeline was 1995-1997.
However, as I continued with the series and once Missing in Montana was completed in 2018 which required backstory to describe a kidnapping in 1992, I realized that there is a certain degree of importance to not just refer to occurrences that happened in the past and how characters lived their lives during that time. It is also critical to develop these occurrences and the characters in such a way as to show the reader how these events actually took place in the author's mind. It reveals the characters in a different light and time than in the current writing.
For instance, in the first three novels, Jim Buchanan is Cedar County Sheriff and Dan McCoy is a retired sheriff. Time is quickly passing Dan by since he retired and some of the old ways of doing things are no longer relevant or even accepted practice. Dan sometimes struggles with this and often comes across to the reader as bumbling, uncooperative, or argumentative and is called out by the people still active in law enforcement. In Missing in Montana, Dan hadn't yet retired and was still Cedar County Sheriff and Jim was a Montana Highway Patrolman. It provided an opportunity to draw Sheriff Dan McCoy with a much different personality and as a confident and courageous law enforcement officer fully in charge of his jurisdiction.
Taking it a step further, I began writing the novel, Blood On the Rez which describes Sheriff Jim Buchanan as a 17-year old Crow youth banished from his tribe for a serious indiscretion. Not only does Jim's domineering father, Angus Buchanan come into play in that novel where he was only a reference point in the first three novels but Sheriff Dan McCoy becomes a surrogate father figure to Jim. In that novel, another character, Willie Otaktay will end up going to prison for a crime that I have referred to in my first three novels. Again, it will provide me with an opportunity to reveal to the reader different aspects of my characters' emotions and behaviors and explain what led up to the situations that I've referenced in the first three novels.
There will be another novel, still unnamed, that will take place between the end of Blood On the Rez and the beginning of Montana Harvest that will follow Jim's career as a Montana Highway Patrolman and leading up to his election as sheriff. It will show him fully involved in trying to solve a mystery.
