Carole Lawrence Books in Order

If you want Victorian Edinburgh mysteries: Edinburgh Twilight → Edinburgh Dusk → Edinburgh Midnight
If you like Gilded Age New York: Cleopatra's Dagger
If you want cozy Austen-inspired crime: Pride, Prejudice and Poison → Death and Sensibility
If you prefer dark profiler thrillers: Silent Screams → Silent Victim → Silent Kills
If you want witty literary whodunits: Who Killed Blanche DuBois? → Who Killed Dorian Gray? → Who Killed Mona Lisa?

Carole Lawrence writes crime fiction in several modes, and under several names. As Carole Lawrence, Carole Buggé, C.E. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Blake, she has moved from Sherlock Holmes pastiches to contemporary profiler thrillers to historical mysteries set in Edinburgh and New York.

Before much of that, she was deeply involved in performance. She acted, did improv comedy for a living, wrote plays and musicals, and built a creative life that mixed fiction with music, theater, and teaching. That range still shows up in her books, which are often very aware of voice, pacing, and the way people perform versions of themselves.

Her path into novels was not a straight line.

She began in mystery with Sherlock Holmes stories, then wrote the Claire Rawlings books, lighter literary whodunits about a New York mystery editor and her very bright young sidekick. Those novels, including Who Killed Blanche DuBois? and Who Killed Dorian Gray?, have a playful setup, but the puzzles are taken seriously. Readers who like traditional mysteries tend to notice the clean plotting and the bookish humor.

Then came a darker turn. Writing as C.E. Lawrence, she created the Lee Campbell series, which starts with Silent Screams. To build those books, she studied criminal psychology, read deeply in true crime, and learned from people who worked close to violent crime. The result is a run of New York thrillers that stay focused on behavior, motive, and the mental strain of chasing dangerous offenders.

She can switch gears fast.

In the Ian Hamilton novels, beginning with Edinburgh Twilight, she heads to 1880s Scotland and writes with a strong feel for place, class tension, and old-city atmosphere. Edinburgh Dusk and Edinburgh Midnight keep that historical texture while following a detective whose personal history keeps pressing into the case at hand. If you like Victorian crime with fog, gaslight, and a city that feels fully lived in, these are often the books readers start with.

Her lighter side is just as clear in the Elizabeth Blake books. Pride, Prejudice and Poison and Death and Sensibility bring murder into the orbit of a village Jane Austen Society, with a bookseller heroine, small-town gossip, and plenty of literary wit. And in Cleopatra's Dagger, she returns to historical crime again, this time in 1880 New York, with a reporter heroine chasing a killer through the city's Gilded Age shadows. That novel was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Original Paperback.

Lawrence's work outside fiction is wide-ranging too. She is a poet, composer, and playwright, and her plays and musicals have been produced in the United States and abroad. Her play Strings Attached was produced Off Broadway, and her poems and short fiction have earned awards including the Euphoria Poetry Competition, the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award, the Maxim Mazumdar Playwriting Competition, the Chronogram Literary Fiction Prize, the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Award, and the Jean Paiva Memorial Fiction Award. She has also been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize in poetry.

She teaches writing at NYU and Gotham Writers Workshop, and has also taught at writers conferences.

Her official bio adds a few personal details that fit the picture. She has called herself a science geek, founded New Jersey's first women's rugby team, and likes hunting mushrooms in the woods. When she is not writing or teaching, she may be at the piano, playing Bach when no one is listening.