Catherine Dilts Books in Order

Catherine Dilts was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and spent her formative years in Oklahoma. She later made a home in Colorado, where she has lived for decades. Those places keep turning up in her work, from mountain tourist towns and rock shops to the Ozark foothills and small communities where people know one another's business.

Reading was part of the groundwork. In small towns, she worked through children's library shelves and gravitated toward horse stories, cowboys, and outdoor writing. She also remembers being drawn to the landscapes and wildlife in Field & Stream, details that help explain the rocks, trails, animals, and working-country settings in her mysteries.

The route to publication was not a straight line.

Before writing fiction full time, Dilts worked in environmental compliance for a global corporation. The job meant careful attention to regulations, materials, and paperwork, the kind of practical knowledge that can make an invented workplace or local problem feel lived-in. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, then kept writing alongside her day job.

One bad coworker gave her a useful spark. Frustrated by the situation, she channeled the feeling into a murder-mystery story, and that piece became her first short-fiction sale. Her short stories have continued to appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, with a dozen published there.

Sometimes irritation is just a rough draft waiting to happen.

Dilts's novels usually work in the cozy, amateur-sleuth tradition, but their characters are not untouched by change. Stone Cold Dead introduces Morgan Iverson, a widowed empty nester who comes to help at her brother's Colorado rock shop and finds herself starting over. In Stone Cold Case and Stone Cold Blooded, Morgan's interest in geology, fossils, and gemstones becomes part of the clue trail, alongside the town's escape-artist donkeys and her partnership with newspaper editor Kurt Willard.

With The Body in the Cattails, Dilts shifted to northeastern Oklahoma for the Rose Creek Mysteries. Four career women meet through a book club and find that friendship comes with unexpected detective work. The Body in the Cornfield brings their different skills back into play as a new death disrupts the town. The books balance local projects, pets, family worries, and romantic complications with murders that give the group a reason to compare notes.

She has also contributed Ink or Swim and A Thorny Plot to the shared-world Secrets of the Castleton Manor Library series. Those stories follow librarian Faith Newberry, the Candle House Book Club, and Watson the cat at a Massachusetts literary retreat. They let Dilts play with themed events, bookish settings, and contained mystery plots.

Today, Dilts writes fiction full time and continues to work in short form as well as series novels. Her public comments make clear that she likes mysteries readers can puzzle through without graphic violence or gore. Expect observant characters, practical clues, and settings that make a missing cat, a fossil, or a field path feel worth a second look.