DA Bartley Books in Order

If you're new to D.A. Bartley: Blessed Be the Wicked → Death in the Covenant
If you want the full Abish Taylor arc: Blessed Be the Wicked → Death in the Covenant
If you like Utah mysteries shaped by faith and family: Blessed Be the Wicked → Death in the Covenant

D.A. Bartley grew up Mormon, with family roots that reach back to the earliest days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was born in Scotland, spent much of her childhood in Utah, and also lived in France, Germany, and Russia. That mix gives her fiction two useful angles at once, deep familiarity with Latter-day Saint culture and a habit of looking closely at how people build communities, rules, and identities.

Utah clearly stayed with her.

Bartley traces her family history to early Mormon converts, and her ancestors settled in the Salt Lake Valley in the late 1840s and early 1850s. She is a member of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, which helps explain why place and memory feel so lived-in in her books. Her novels do not treat Utah as generic scenery. They treat it as family history, social structure, and unfinished argument.

Her formal path was not straight into publishing. She studied international relations, politics, and law, earning both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. After that she moved to New York City, worked at a global law firm, and later worked as a research scholar with a focus on international relations. It sounds far from crime fiction, but the link becomes obvious once you read her work.

Bartley has said she is drawn to questions about how communities organize themselves, how rules are enforced, and how belief systems hold together. That interest runs quietly under everything she writes, and it gives her mysteries a little more on their mind than simple puzzle solving.

Mystery came first, though.

She has described herself as a mystery lover for as long as she can remember, and after years in law and academia she started dreaming up murders of her own. Her debut novel, Blessed Be the Wicked (2018), introduces Detective Abish Taylor, a lapsed Mormon who returns to Pleasant View, Utah, after her husband's death and finds herself investigating a brutal killing tied to church history, family strain, and old secrets. The book was nominated for a Reading the West Book Award.

She followed it with Death in the Covenant (2019), the second Abish Taylor novel. This time a death that looks like a car accident opens into a wider investigation involving a beloved church leader, missing young women, and a former LDS colony in Mexico. Together, the two books show what readers tend to like about Bartley, smart mystery plotting, a strong sense of Utah, and a real interest in the knots between faith, loyalty, silence, and power.

Her fiction keeps coming back to people who know a system from the inside but no longer fit comfortably within it. Abish Taylor is the clearest example, competent, stubborn, grieving, and never fully at ease in the town that raised her. Bartley also has a knack for showing how big institutions shape small private lives. In her books, church history, family expectation, and local politics all press on the same characters at the same time.

Away from the page, Bartley has been active in the mystery world and has belonged to groups including Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime. Her author bio says she splits her time between Manhattan and upstate New York with her husband and children. She also seems happy to keep experimenting in the kitchen, especially if popcorn is involved.