Every answer on this page is true of every book in the series. That is the whole point of putting them here instead of on the books. Because they are true of all of them, reading this page cannot spoil any one of them.
Two things do happen, and they are named at the bottom, plainly, so you can decide before you start rather than find out in chapter one.
No. Not in any book, not in the background, not ever. Babies arrive and everybody is fine.
No. Not the leads, not a couple in the background, not once.
No. Nobody dies on the page in any of the ten. The deaths that exist are all offstage and all before the story or outside it. Hugh's great-aunt Margery was ninety-six and died months before Reasonable Temperature opens. Dec Quinn's grandparents died in their eighties, in the epilogue of Resting State, two paragraphs and no scene. And Rex King is a widower, which is the one that is actually heavy, and it has its own answer further down.
No. There is one scene that will read as child peril if that is a thing you screen for, and it is in Off Leash. It has its own answer further down.
Everyone in this town is an animal, so the honest answer is: only the way animals get hurt in ordinary life. A cut. An ear infection. Tim is the town vet and he treats a cow with an abscess. Nobody gets hit by a car. Nothing worse than a normal week at a normal practice.
No. There is no third-act breakup in any of the ten. From Defense Mechanism onward there is no separation of any kind. Not a misunderstanding, not a walkout, not a chapter spent apart.
No. In all ten books it is said out loud, before, in plain words, by the person whose choice it is.
Yes. Every book is a complete story with its own couple and its own ending.
Reading in order gets you more of the in-jokes. Out of order you might hit a kid you have never heard of, or a couple in the background you are not familiar with, but you will not miss any plot.
And some people pick by species, which is fair enough. If you have no interest in a platypus and a wombat, or a shark and a jaguar, skip it. I still think you should read them all. ;)
Page count, in both directions. One novella on its own is too short to print. It would come out as a very thin paperback at a price nobody would feel good about. Five of them together is too many pages to print at a sensible price. Three is the compromise, and it lands between 312 and 419 pages, which is a real book you can hold.
An ebook has no such problem, so the Kindle collection is Books One through Five, and it carries three bonus shorts as well.
One thing that follows from this: the two collections do not contain the same books, so Amazon lists them as two separate products rather than as two formats of the same thing. That is correct, not a mistake, and it is the only place in the catalogue where that is true.
No. Nobody in Bad Little Falls is cruel and nobody punches down. That is the rule the whole series is built on and it holds in every book. If a joke looks like it is about to land on somebody, watch where it actually lands.
Coalition Territory, Book Ten. Malika died at thirty-four, of a weak place in an artery she was born with that nobody knew about, in the room where their son was being born. It is before the book, off the page, and it is present all the way through. If you screen for a dead spouse, or for death in childbirth, or for a child whose birthday is also the day, it is here, and you should know that before you start rather than after.
Off Leash, Book Seven, chapters four and five. Six of seven shifted preschoolers get loose on a working pier and it takes four minutes to get them all back. Nobody is hurt. Nobody is close to hurt for more than seconds. Every adult present does the right thing immediately, and one three-year-old holds the rope the whole time. It is still four minutes of small children and open water, and if that is a thing you avoid, avoid it.
Screening for something that is not on this page? Write to hello@ecdane.com and ask. I will answer, and if it turns out other people wondered too, it goes on the page.