Brimful Coffers Books in Order

Brimful Coffers is Marian Babson at her most playful. The series is set in a small English writers' colony where mystery novelists live side by side, carry old grudges, keep a close eye on one another's careers, and, naturally, drift toward murder. The setting matters a lot. This is not just a village with writers in it. It is a village shaped by plots, deadlines, public personas, and the awkward fact that people who invent crime for a living can be surprisingly dramatic off the page.

At the center is mystery writer Lorinda Lucas, a successful author who would often prefer a little peace and a lot less nonsense. In Canapés for the Kitties, she is tired of the elderly sleuths who made her famous and wants to write them out of her life. That private wish ripples outward through Brimful Coffers in a way that feels funny, strange, and just a little unnerving. Babson blurs the line between fiction and real life without turning the series into full fantasy. The effect is more sly than spooky.

This series enjoys literary egos almost as much as it enjoys cats.

And there are plenty of cats. Had-I and But-Known belong to Lorinda, while Roscoe lives nearby and becomes part of the village's social weather. In Babson's hands, the pets are not ornamental. They are hungry, observant, inconvenient, and often better judges of character than the humans around them. That helps give Brimful Coffers its tone: cozy on the surface, faintly chaotic underneath, and always ready for domestic disruption.

The second book, Please Do Feed the Cat, keeps the same small world but shifts the tension. Lorinda returns from a book tour to find neighbor Macho Magee and Roscoe under the thumb of another writer who has barged into both house and life. What starts as worry about an underfed cat opens into a sharper look at possessiveness, rivalry, and the petty wars that simmer inside a creative community. By the time murder arrives, the ground has already been prepared by envy, vanity, and people pushing too far.

These books are meta in the most inviting way.

They poke gentle fun at publishing, author brands, and the strange relationship between writers and the characters who pay the bills. But they are still proper mysteries, with closed-circle energy, village gossip, and secrets hiding behind everyday routines. If you like the idea of crime stories set among crime writers, with a little satire, a lot of cat presence, and a cast of neighbors who know far too much about one another, Brimful Coffers is a short series with a very specific charm.