Bree Baker Books in Order

Bree Baker is one of the names used by Julie Hatcher, also known to readers as Julie Anne Lindsey. Under the Baker name, she created the Seaside Café Mysteries, a seven-book sequence about Everly Swan and her iced tea shop. The pen name gives this particular corner of her work its own identity, while her other names appear on mysteries and romantic suspense stories with different characters and settings.

Her fictional seaside is far from her Ohio home.

Baker's interest in sweet tea, small towns and the coast comes together in Everly's business, Sun, Sand, and Tea. Everly returns to Charm, North Carolina, hoping that owning a beachside café will give her life a steadier direction. That hopeful starting point helps explain the series' appeal: readers meet someone trying to make an ordinary fresh start before a murder forces her to become involved in something much less predictable. The shop gives the stories a gathering place as well as a livelihood worth protecting.

Live and Let Chai, published in 2018, opens that sequence. A customer's death outside the café threatens Everly's plans and makes her a suspect. The mystery grows out of her new working life rather than arriving as a problem she can safely leave to someone else. In No Good Tea Goes Unpunished, a beach wedding brings another case into her orbit. Events intended to bring people together become opportunities to discover how complicated the relationships in a small community can be.

The titles leave room for a joke.

That playful approach continues in Partners in Lime, where a murdered surfer puts Everly's friend under suspicion. Pleading the Fish brings the series to its seventh and final book, with wedding plans disrupted by a death connected to someone investigating Swan family history. Across the sequence, the tea shop, family connections and local friendships make each investigation part of a continuing life. Readers can return for the case while also following what happens to the people around it.

Hatcher's writing career extends beyond this one series. Her current biography records more than sixty novels since her 2013 debut. Writing as Julie Anne Lindsey, she received the 2019 Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery/Suspense and the 2020 National Readers' Choice Award for Romance Adventure. Those facts reflect work in more than one type of storytelling, with both danger and relationships playing a part. The Baker books offer the particular combination of a coastal community, a food business and an amateur investigator.

She also speaks about tea as something she enjoys away from the page. Living in Ohio, she has described visiting local tea shops with her daughter and friends when a trip to the beach is not possible. That everyday interest gives a practical connection to the café setting without making Everly's circumstances a copy of the author's own life. The series turns a familiar pleasure into a place where characters meet, exchange news and sometimes conceal something.

Hatcher's current biography places her in Kent, Ohio. For readers meeting the Baker name first, Live and Let Chai offers the clearest introduction, followed by the remaining Seaside Café books in order. The completed sequence lets Everly's relationships develop alongside the separate mysteries.