Catie Murphy Books in Order

If you want Irish cozy mysteries: Dead in Dublin → Death on the Green → Death of an Irish Mummy
If you want her signature urban fantasy: Urban Shaman → Thunderbird Falls → Coyote Dreams
If you want court intrigue and high fantasy: The Queen's Bastard → The Pretender's Crown
If you want a standalone with a fantasy Austen feel: Magic & Manners

Catie Murphy is one of the names Catherine E. Murphy uses, especially for her mystery fiction. She was born in Kenai, Alaska, and raised in Alaska. She started writing at about six years old, after sending three poems to a school publication. The teacher picked the one she thought was worst, but also told her to keep going.

She did.

Before novels became the center of her working life, Murphy collected the kind of job list that sounds oddly perfect for a future writer. She volunteered at a public library when she was nine and ten, and later worked as an archival assistant, a cannery worker, and a web designer. Books kept showing up in the background, even when publishing still felt far away.

She wrote for years before breaking through. A big turning point came in 2002, when she attended the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold conference. Not long after that, Harlequin bought Urban Shaman, the book that introduced Joanne Walker and kicked off the Walker Papers.

That series remains one of the clearest ways into her work. Urban Shaman begins with a Seattle police mechanic who wants nothing to do with magic and winds up forced to accept shamanic power anyway, and later books such as Thunderbird Falls and Demon Hunts keep pushing Joanne into bigger, stranger trouble. Readers who click with Murphy there usually like the same things across much of her fiction, fast movement, folklore in everyday settings, and women who keep going even when they are badly outnumbered.

But one shelf has never been enough for her.

Under C.E. Murphy she has moved easily between different corners of fantasy. Heart of Stone opens a hidden-world story about defense lawyer Margrit Knight and a gargoyle. Truthseeker sends a truth-sensitive tailor into Faerie, while The Queen's Bastard leans into court politics, espionage, and dangerous family loyalties. Then, writing as Catie Murphy, she shifts gears into the Dublin Driver Mysteries, beginning with Dead in Dublin and its murder-prone limo driver, Megan Malone.

What ties those books together is not one setting or one genre, but a certain way of building a story. Murphy likes outsiders, reluctant heroes, sharp banter, and practical people dealing with very impractical problems. Whether the threat is magic, murder, or a mess of old loyalties, her characters usually have to work it out step by step. She also uses different bylines to signal what kind of story readers are getting, science fiction and fantasy under C.E. Murphy, cozy mysteries as Catie Murphy, and paranormal romance under other pen names.

Genre borders have never looked very solid to her.

She now lives with her family in Ireland, her ancestral homeland, and that part of her life shows most clearly in the Dublin books. Titles like Death on the Green, Death in Irish Accents, and Death of an Irish Druid make room for Irish places, speech rhythms, and everyday routines without losing sight of the mystery. That mix of grounded detail and wide-ranging imagination is a good guide to Murphy's bibliography as a whole.