Cindy Brown Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: MacDeath → The Sound of Murder → Oliver Twisted
If you love backstage theater chaos: MacDeath → The Sound of Murder → The Phantom of Oz
If you want the funniest later capers: Ivy Get Your Gun → Killalot
If you want a darker standalone mystery: Echoes of the Lost

Cindy Brown grew up in Washington state and got her first professional theater job when she was 14. Theater was not a side hobby for long. She went on to work as a musician, actor, director, producer, and playwright, and that long backstage education still powers her fiction.

Theater came first.

Writing arrived a little later. Brown has said she did not take it seriously until her 30s, when she was teaching a summer theater camp and could not find a script with enough parts for all the kids. So she wrote one herself. Then she wrote another, then screenplays, then plays, and eventually novels. A second turning point came when Ivy Meadows showed up in her imagination, already an actress, already working part time for a PI, and clearly headed for trouble.

Brown spent more than 25 years living in Phoenix, Arizona, and that setting gave her a ready-made world: small theaters, odd jobs, desert heat, and people trying to make art without much money. Out of that came MacDeath, her 2015 debut, in which aspiring actress Ivy Meadows lands a role in a circus-style Macbeth and ends up investigating a death backstage. The book earned an Agatha Award nomination for best first novel and introduced the mix Brown would keep refining: jokes, danger, theater lore, and a heroine who is both earnest and stubborn.

The Ivy Meadows books build from there. The Sound of Murder sends Ivy into a dinner-theater musical and a retirement community case. Oliver Twisted strands her on a book-themed cruise full of thefts and murder. The Phantom of Oz brings in a haunted theater vibe, while Killalot heads to a Renaissance faire. Readers who like Brown usually like the same things Ivy likes: big feelings, messy productions, fast banter, and the weird little disasters that happen when creative people are under pressure.

Brown likes stories about people who are in over their heads and keep going anyway.

Her work is not limited to cozy mysteries. She has had more than a dozen plays produced, writes crime fiction for radio, and in 2026 published Echoes of the Lost, a more serious Portland-set mystery about retired detective Ster McCaffrey, a lost child, and the city's unhoused community. Across the tonal shift, the through line is still there. Brown's stories keep circling back to justice, community, and the question of who gets seen clearly, and who gets ignored.

That concern feels connected to the rest of her career. Brown has more than two decades of professional experience in accessibility and disability work, has worked with arts access programs in Arizona, and in recent years has coordinated work connected to the Kennedy Center's Access/VSA network. She was also part of a disability journalism fellowship in 2024. None of that reads like box checking in the fiction. It reads like a writer paying attention to how people move through the world.

These days Brown lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and a scruffy little terrier named Seamus. She has said Portland is her favorite city, and it now shares space with Phoenix in her work, one rainy, one sun-blasted, both good places for a mystery. She gardens, writes, and keeps finding new corners of crime fiction to explore.