Cheryl Honigford Books in Order

Cheryl Honigford grew up in Ohio, and storytelling seems to have arrived early. She has said she was making up stories before she could properly write them down, and once she could, her dad would haul an old Underwood manual typewriter to the dining room table so she could peck out tales of her own.

She started young.

Honigford studied journalism at The Ohio State University, with a minor in English, but writing was never far from view. One of the first complete stories she remembers finishing was The Mouse That Didn’t Believe in Santa Claus, written and illustrated in third grade. Even later, when work and everyday life pulled her into a career outside publishing, she kept hold of the idea that she wanted to write fiction.

The spark that shaped her novels came from old-time radio. After seeing Radio Days in eighth grade, she became fascinated by radio drama, classic movies, and the whole feel of the 1930s. Years later, listening to vintage radio shows through earbuds at her desk, she began wondering what kind of mystery might unfold inside a bustling Chicago station during the height of the medium.

That idea became The Darkness Knows. Honigford has said the book began life during NaNoWriMo, then took a long road to publication. It was about seven years from the start of the manuscript to the published novel, a stretch that taught her a lot about patience. Along the way, the unpublished book became a quarter-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest and won the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense in the unpublished category.

She kept at it.

With The Darkness Knows, Homicide for the Holidays, and Dig Deep My Grave, Honigford built the Viv and Charlie Mystery series around rising radio actress Vivian Witchell and private detective Charlie Haverman. The books mix murder plots with a light romantic thread, and they make good use of a world Honigford clearly enjoys: studios, rehearsal rooms, speakeasies, wealthy families, and a Chicago that still feels alive under theater lights and streetcars.

Research is a big part of her process. She has talked about digging into how radio shows were produced, reading old fan and trade material, and trying to picture exactly what Chicago looked, sounded, and smelled like in 1938. That attention shows up in the books' atmosphere, but she also likes keeping things lively. She once described her writing style in a single word, light, which fits the balance of danger, humor, and banter in her fiction.

Her reading tastes are broad, too. She has named writers as different as Willa Cather, Tim O’Brien, Anya Seton, Stephen King, Dorothy Parker, and Mark Twain as favorites or dream dinner companions. That mix helps explain her own books, which lean historical and suspenseful but never get too stiff about genre.

When she is not writing, Honigford likes making things with her hands, including crochet, knitting, and baking. She lives with her family in the Chicago suburbs, and that combination of practical day-to-day life and deep affection for old pop culture feels like a pretty good key to her work.