Cynthia Riggs Books in Order

Start at the beginning: Deadly Nightshade → The Cranefly Orchid Murders → The Cemetery Yew
If you want classic Vineyard village mysteries: Jack in the Pulpit → The Paperwhite Narcissus → Indian Pipes
If you like community drama and clever hooks: Shooting Star → Death and Honesty → Touch-Me-Not
If you want later-series comfort reads: The Bee Balm Murders → Poison Ivy → Bloodroot → Trumpet of Death → Widow's Wreath

Cynthia Riggs was born on June 15, 1931, on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and she grew up with the Island in her bones. She is a 13th-generation Islander, and much of her life has centered on West Tisbury and the old family homestead. Her mother, Dionis Coffin Riggs, was a poet. Her father, Sidney Noyes Riggs, was a principal, printmaker, and artist. Words, pictures, weather, and local history were all part of the furniture from the start.

She also grew up with a strong sense that a place is never just scenery. That helps explain why her fiction feels so tied to roads, coves, gardens, ferries, and the habits of year-round Vineyard life. Readers who come to her books for the mysteries usually stay for the Island itself.

Before she published a novel, Riggs had already packed in several lives. She studied geology at Antioch College, then worked in science and communications jobs, including time with the National Geographic Society. She spent much of her married life in Washington, D.C., taking on a long list of jobs and adventures. She spent time in Antarctica, later became the seventh woman to set foot on the South Pole, qualified for the 1948 Olympic fencing team, and crossed the Atlantic twice in a thirty-two-foot sailboat. She raised five children along the way.

She came to fiction late, and that turns out to have been one of her strengths.

After her mother's death, and after decades of work, travel, and family life, she enrolled in the MFA program at Vermont College in her late sixties. While studying there, she started writing the mystery novel that became Deadly Nightshade. That book introduced Victoria Trumbull, her sharp-eyed ninety-two-year-old poet and sleuth, and launched the series most readers know her for.

The books readers mention most often are Deadly Nightshade, The Cranefly Orchid Murders, Jack in the Pulpit, The Bee Balm Murders, and Poison Ivy. People tend to like the same things in them again and again: the dry humor, the plant-themed titles, the local politics, the old grudges, and the fact that Victoria solves crimes with memory, common sense, and deep knowledge of the people around her. These are cozy mysteries, but they are never cut off from money, land fights, class tension, or the push and pull between summer visitors and year-round residents.

Martha's Vineyard is never just a backdrop in her work.

Riggs has also written nonfiction connected to her own life and to the Island, including Victoria Trumbull's Martha's Vineyard, Howard and Cynthia: A Love Story, and her memoir Wait, Spring. In the memoir, she writes about travel, family, and finding love again late in life. Those books make it clear that the curiosity in the mysteries is her curiosity too. She notices people, asks practical questions, and cares about how communities actually function.

She has long lived in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, where she has run a bed-and-breakfast from her family home. She has also led writing groups and given summer talks on tourist boats. It suits her. After all the travel and side roads, she ended up writing the kind of books only someone who really knows a place could write.