Connie Archer Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: A Spoonful of Murder
If you want the core early run: A Spoonful of Murder → A Broth of Betrayal → A Roux of Revenge → Ladle to the Grave
If you like seasonal New England cozies: A Roux of Revenge → Ladle to the Grave → A Clue in the Stew
If you want one later sample first: A Clue in the Stew

Connie Archer is the pen name of mystery writer Connie di Marco, and the name she uses for the Soup Lover's books. She was born and raised in New England, with childhood days split between neighborhood ponds, Cape Cod beaches, and ski trips to Vermont. That mix of cold weather, small-town rhythm, and comfort food would later feel right at home in her fiction.

She was a serious reader early on. As a schoolgirl she worked her way through Caesar's Gallic War and the Aeneid, while also falling hard for mystery stories. Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden came first, then Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers, Nicholas Freeling, and Henning Mankell.

Acting came before writing.

In college, she started out in biology and then made a sharp turn to English literature. After that she worked a long list of jobs, including laboratory technician, cocktail waitress, medical secretary, and dinner theater actress. She later spent much of her adult life as an actress, which gave her a close look at the stop-and-start nature of creative work.

Her move into fiction, by her own account, was a sideways one. During a boring day on a television set, she decided to try writing a mystery instead of just thinking about it. One book led to another, and soon she was building the kind of stories she most liked to read, tightly knit mysteries where place, routine, and human mess all matter.

That approach fits the Soup Lover's Mystery series well. In A Spoonful of Murder, A Broth of Betrayal, A Roux of Revenge, Ladle to the Grave, and A Clue in the Stew, Lucky Jamieson runs the By the Spoonful soup shop in the fictional Vermont town of Snowflake and keeps stumbling into murder. Readers who enjoy these books tend to like the seasonal New England setting, the steady cast of town characters, and the way the food never crowds out the mystery.

The soup is cozy, but the real engine is relationships.

Archer has said that she often starts with an emotional spark, usually something rooted in family, friendship, betrayal, or old secrets. That shows on the page. Her crimes may begin with a dead tourist, a missing friend, or trouble at a town festival, but the tension usually comes from people who know one another too well. The village setting keeps the suspect pool tight and the motives personal.

Writing as Connie di Marco, she later moved into another mystery series, beginning with The Madness of Mercury, about a San Francisco astrologer named Julia Bonatti. Even with the change in setting, the through line is easy to spot: smart amateur sleuths, troubled communities, and puzzles driven more by character than gadgetry. She has also contributed recipes and excerpts to mystery cookbooks, which feels fitting given how much soup matters in the Snowflake books.

These days she lives in Los Angeles with her family and, as she has joked, a constantly talking cat named Basil. Even so, her work keeps one boot in New England. You can feel it in the weather, the food, and the way her best-known series treats small-town life as both comfort and trouble at once.