There's a travel trend picking up steam across California and it makes perfect sense. It's called set-jetting: traveling to the places that captured your imagination in a book or on screen. When a story makes a place feel real enough to touch, people want to go find it.
Catalina Island does that to people. And right now, thanks to one of crime fiction's biggest names, more readers than ever are looking up ferry schedules.
Stilwell's Catalina Is Waiting for You
Michael Connelly, the bestselling author behind Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer, launched a brand-new series set entirely on Catalina Island. Nightshade (2025) introduces Detective Sergeant Stilwell, an LA County Sheriff's detective quietly reassigned from his mainland homicide desk to the seemingly sleepy post of Avalon. A body turns up weighted down in the harbor and the island's sun-drenched surface starts to crack open. Ironwood, released in May 2026, kicks off at Airport in the Sky, 1,600 feet above sea level in the island's rugged interior, where a midnight drug drop goes violently wrong and Stilwell finds himself sidelined, digging through a lost and found that holds more than anyone expected.
What makes these books so vivid is how specifically Connelly plants you on the island. You're not in a generic seaside town. You're on Crescent Avenue. You're at the Casino. You're watching a plane circle in the dark above an airstrip most of the mainland doesn't even know exists. Readers finish these books wanting to stand where Stilwell stood — and the good news is, you absolutely can.
And the series keeps growing. Connelly is already writing a third Catalina novel for a May 2027 release, and David E. Kelley, the Emmy-winning creator behind The Lincoln Lawyer and Big Little Lies, is adapting Nightshade for HBO Max as a series called Welcome to Catalina. The island is about to get a very big spotlight. Come experience it before everyone else does.
Walk the Story
We partnered with Little Brown Books to create downloadable maps of Avalon and Catalina Island with locations from both Nightshade and Ironwood marked. Read the books, then come walk the pages.
The real locations Connelly wrote into these stories are all here, waiting.
In Nightshade, the mystery opens at Avalon Harbor, where the body surfaces near the Cabrillo Mole and Green Pleasure Pier. From there, Crescent Avenue and its stretch of beaches serve as the beating heart of everyday island life, the calm backdrop that makes the darkness feel sharper. The Casino looms large as a symbol of the island's social history and its power players, and Connelly's fictional Black Marlin Club maps directly onto the Tuna Club along Casino Way, where Avalon's real elite have gathered for over a century. The Wrigley Memorial and Botanic Garden and the conservancy lands echo the book's wilder, more isolated themes.
In Ironwood, the action moves into the island's interior. Airport in the Sky, perched at 1,602 feet and ten miles from Avalon, is where Stilwell and his deputies intercept a midnight drug drop on the runway — the scene that sets everything in motion. The Casino and the Chimes Tower show up in the story's Avalon scenes. Stilwell grabs coffee at Catalina Coffee and Cookie Company. The Buffalo Nickel appears. The Hermit Gulch Trail and the Trans Catalina Trail run through the book's mountainside chase sequences. Bluewater Grille and the landscape above Avalon fill in the rest.
Every single one of those places is real, and every single one of them is visitable. Grab the map and spend a day living the story.
Catalina Has Always Drawn Writers In
Connelly isn't alone in finding Catalina irresistible. CB Wilson set her gem-heist mystery The Water Diamond here, chasing a lost Art Deco bracelet tied to the island's 1920s history through the Casino and Avalon's waterfront. Rachel Howzell Hall's What Never Happened puts a Catalina writer at the center of a string of suspicious deaths among her neighbors. Carolyn Maddux's A View to Die For imagines a murder mystery around a proposed luxury resort on Mount Ada, with most of Avalon holding a motive. Stuart Woods brought Stone Barrington to the island too.
Writers keep returning to Catalina for the same reason visitors do. It's close enough to reach easily and far enough to feel like you've actually gone somewhere. Gorgeous on the surface, layered underneath. That combination is irresistible in a story and even better in person.
Plan Your Visit
Whether you've read both Connelly novels and want to retrace Stilwell's steps, or you're just drawn to a place that belongs in a story, Catalina delivers.
Take the ferry from Long Beach, San Pedro, or Dana Point. Walk the harbor. Find a table along Crescent Avenue and watch the light change on the water. Head up to Airport in the Sky and look out over the interior of the island the way Stilwell does, scanning the mountains, watching the sky.
Twenty-six miles from the mainland and genuinely another world. Come see it for yourself.
