Dawn Eastman Books in Order

Dawn Eastman grew up in southeast Michigan, surrounded by animals and the kind of busy household that later found its way into her fiction. She lived in Ann Arbor for many years and has kept a strong connection to Michigan, especially its small towns, lake-country atmosphere, and autumn weather.

Before she published mysteries, Eastman worked as a family medicine physician in Michigan. That experience gave her a practical understanding of small-town life and the daily pressures of caring for people, details that add weight to the medical settings in her later books.

Writing had been on her mind for a long time. After finishing an earlier mystery that did not become the book she hoped it would be, she started looking for a story that felt lighter and more playful. That was when Clytemnestra, known as Clyde, Fortune appeared, along with Clyde’s tarot-reading mother and pet-psychic aunt.

The result was Pall in the Family, Eastman’s first novel and the opening book in the Family Fortune Mystery series. It introduces Crystal Haven, Michigan, a town where psychics, séances, and unusual talents are part of everyday life. Clyde is a former police officer trying to avoid both murder investigations and her family’s expectations that she embrace her own gifts.

Michigan matters in these books.

Eastman has said that time spent vacationing on Michigan’s west coast helped inspire the setting, and that she wanted to create a place where psychic ability could be treated as an ordinary part of community life. The Family Fortune books mix small-town suspects, dogs, ghosts, tarot cards, family friction, and a slow-building relationship between Clyde and detective Mac McKenzie. Be Careful What You Witch For, A Fright to the Death, and An Unhappy Medium each bring Clyde into another murder case without losing the family humor at the center of the series.

Eastman later drew on her medical background more directly for the Dr. Katie LeClair Mysteries. In Unnatural Causes, a new doctor in Baxter, Michigan, finds her quiet new life upended when a patient’s apparent suicide points back to a prescription she does not remember writing. Its follow-up, Do No Harm, brings Katie into an old murder case, a disappearance, and a dangerous Halloween season.

The two series have different shades of mystery. The Family Fortune books are cozy and paranormal, with eccentric relatives and a lively tourist town. The Katie LeClair books are more grounded in medical questions and buried local secrets, though they still center on capable women trying to make sense of trouble close to home.

Animals show up often, and not just as background decoration. Eastman grew up with dogs and a rotating cast of pets and rescue animals, and that affection is easy to spot in her stories.

She lives in Iowa with her husband, son, daughter, and a small dog with a notably bossy personality. When she is not writing, she has also named knitting and reading among her favorite pastimes.