Annelie Wendeberg Books in Order

For the core Anna Kronberg story: The Lion's Courtship → The Devil's Grin → The Fall → The Journey
If you want the Anna Kronberg trilogy in one volume: Moriarty
If you want Anna's later Boston years: Silent Witnesses → River of Bones
For post-collapse dystopia: 1/2986 / Cut → Fog → Ice → Vow
For gritty Victorian crime outside Holmes: Keeper of Pleas → Spider Silk

Annelie Wendeberg was born in Germany, and long before fiction took over her working life, she built a career in science. She worked as an environmental microbiologist, later taught science writing, and has described herself as someone who spent about twenty years inside academic and research worlds before stepping away to write full time.

Science came first.

That background matters because it shaped both her subjects and her habits. Earlier profiles show her working on microbes and groundwater cleanup, and on her own site she mentions a Caltech Price Fellowship and a Helmholtz professorship focused on supporting women in science. She has also said that she eventually left academia when the politics and management side of the job started crowding out the part she loved most, the actual thinking, making, and discovery.

Then she wrote a novel.

She has recalled waking up one morning and telling her husband that she was going to write a book. That instinct turned into the Anna Kronberg stories, beginning with The Devil's Grin, where a bacteriologist in Victorian London investigates a suspicious death and crosses paths with Sherlock Holmes. The mix is very much her lane: crime, science, history, and a heroine who has to outthink systems designed to keep her out.

Readers who stay with Anna move from the slums of London to medical conspiracies, captivity, and a long battle with Moriarty across The Fall and The Journey. In the prequel The Lion's Courtship, Wendeberg leans even harder into the city's underworld. Later, in Silent Witnesses, she carries Anna's life forward into Boston under a new name, Elizabeth Arlington. What ties these books together is not just plot. It is Wendeberg's fondness for smart women under pressure, dense atmosphere, and the uneasy overlap of care, violence, and power.

She doesn't write tidy worlds.

In Cut, the opening book of her 1/2986 sequence, a desperate teenage girl named Micka is shoved into a brutal post-collapse future shaped by climate disaster and extremist violence. Keeper of Pleas shifts back to Victorian Whitechapel, with a coroner and a sex worker picking through crimes respectable society would rather ignore. The Memory Collector adds a gothic edge through Beatrice Wren, a woman dismissed as mad who reads memories in objects and follows those whispers into murder. Different setup, same appetite for danger, damaged people, and moral mess.

Wendeberg has published independently and through traditional houses, and she says her books have sold nearly a million copies in several languages. She now describes herself not just as a writer, but also as an artist, scientist, and educator, which feels like a fair summary of how many lanes she likes to keep open at once.

In 2025, she wrote that she and her family sold everything and began traveling across Europe with their dog Fiona. Along the way she started making hyper-realist wildlife art, and she later said the road would give way to the Swedish Arctic in summer 2026. That restless, curious energy feels familiar if you've read her fiction. Her characters rarely get to stand still for long, and it seems their creator doesn't either.