Tim Mason Books In Order

Publication Order of Inspector Charles Field Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Tim Mason
Tim Mason is an American playwright and novelist. He was born February 14, 1950 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As a young child, he moved with his family to Minneapolis. He is the son of Reverend John Martin Mason II who was a minister, author, and traveled the country as an advocate of the elderly. Tim’s mom was Mertrice Rosalys Mason.

During high school Tim Mason performed in numerous plays at the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis. He got his degree at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and studied at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, England in 1971. While he was in college he wrote a number of plays for the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, which includes “Robin Hood: A Story of the Forest and Kidnapped in London”, which won the 1972 National Society of Arts and Letters Award.

Tim has won a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, the Hollywood DramaLogue Award, the W. Alton Jones Foundation Award, the Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Berilla Kerr Playwrights Award.

“In A Northern Landscape” is a play that was released in 1998. The play takes place in a Minnesota farming community during the 1920s, where Samuel Bredahl, who is a young college student, lives with his Bible quoting and puritanical mom, and his dryly academic dad, who works as a professor of philosophy at the local college. There’s also his restless and sensitive sister Emma.

The setting shows a burned out farmhouse, which was once the Bredahl home, and is now a chilling reminder of the cataclysmic events which, as told through a series of flashbacks, underscore the action of this play.

Emma and Samuel, both bored and isolated, are drawn more closely together and apart from their stern parents and Samuel’s own boorish fellow students. Emma’s cherished rabbits get torn apart by the wild dogs that roam the countryside, it’s her brother that she turns to for consolation. And it is her public declaration of the love that follows which leads to the crucial events that foreshadow the play that the outraged townsfolk incinerate the Bredahl home, pushing Samuel right into the jaws of the wild dogs. He leaves the family to ponder their own roles in these tragic happenings and the lifelong retribution that they have to face as a consequence.

“The Last Synapsid” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2009. Just Rob and his best buddy Phoebe investigate this creature that lurks near Faith, Colorado this spring, which eats pets and then scatters their remains on the mountainside.

Sid, the Last Synapsid, a squat and drooly dinosaur-wienerdog cross lookalike, chases down violent carnivore ‘gorgonopsid’. Gorgon, who is fascinated by humanity, refuses to go back to his own time period. Should history change, humans won’t ever evolve.

“The Darwin Affair” is the first in the “Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field” series and was released in 2019. Dive into this edge-of-your-seat Victorian era thriller, while London’s Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field investigates this series of unspeakable crimes set off by the controversial publication On the Origin of Species.

June of 1860, in London. When this assassination attempt is made on Queen Victoria, and one petty thief is gruesomely killed just moments later, and only one block away, Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field soon surmises that these crimes are linked. Was Victoria truly this assassin’s target? Or were these crimes part of a much more sinister plot?

Field’s investigation quickly exposes this stunning conspiracy: the publication of Charles Darwin’s controversial On the Origin of Species has kicked off a series of horrible crimes (arson, kidnapping, and murder). Witnesses describe this shadowy figure with coal-black and lifeless eyes. While the investigation takes Field from the hallowed halls of Oxford to the dangerous alleyways of London, the list of potential conspirators increases, and the body count escalates. And while he edges ever closer to this dastardly madman known as the Chorister, he finds some dark secrets which were meant to remain hidden forever.

This was a Reader’s Digest Best Summer Book, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a Wall Street Journal Best Mystery Book of the Year, and a Forbes.com Best Historical Novel of the Summer.

“The Nightingale Affair” is the second in the “Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field” series and was released in 2023. Charles Field hunts a serial killer with a pretty sinister signature and is targeting Florence Nightingale’s nurses in Crimea and women in London.

Who’s stalking Florence Nightingale and her nurses? Could it be the legendary Beast of the Crimean, or somebody much closer to home? In 1855, France and Britain are fighting in order to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire. And Nightingale, who is a wealthy society woman, has made it her mission to improve the horrid conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey, despite some fierce objections from the male doctors around her.

Once young women begin turning up dead, with their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Field (who was the real life inspiration for Inspector Bucket from Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”) is sent from England to track the killer down among military men, journalists, doctors, and others swarming Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital. While he’s here he meets both the famous Nightingale and Nurse Jane Rolly, the woman that’ll become his wife, and while he races to protect both of them, the prime suspect takes his own life.

Case closed. Right?

Back in London, twelve years later, amid the turmoil surrounding the expansion of voting rights, women begin to turn up dead again, with their mouths being covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Could Field have suspected the wrong guy before, or could he now be dealing with some deviant copycat? Either way, he will have to race against the clock to stop this murderer before any more bodies are found, and before his own family gets pulled into this danger.

Populated by some real figures of the day, from novelist Wilkie Collins to Benjamin Disraeli to, obviously, Florence herself, and steeped in the historical details of 1860s London, this novel plays out against a backdrop of this rapidly changing society. Most of all, it’s a pure reading delight, which offers unforgettably vivid scenes, shocks, and some surprising twists.