DB Borton Books in Order

D.B. Borton grew up in Houston, Texas, in a world of broad highways, hot weather, basketball, and mystery stories. As a teenager, she drove her own blue roadster around Houston, a detail that fits neatly with her lifelong affection for Nancy Drew and independent young detectives.

Before turning to fiction full-time, Borton built a career in English studies. She earned three degrees in English, lived in the Southwest, Midwest, and on the West Coast, and later taught at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she became a professor emeritus.

Her academic work has covered film, women's literature, ghost stories, and the Gothic. She has also written about the long history of girl detectives, from early popular fiction to the sleuths who followed. That background shows up in her novels, which often mix a sharp eye for social history with a real fondness for people who start asking questions when everyone else would rather move on.

Then a career crossroads led her to murder mysteries.

Borton's first major fictional detective was Cat Caliban, the heroine of One for the Money. Cat is a recently widowed grandmother in Cincinnati who decides it is finally time to train as a private investigator. The Cat Caliban books pair tangled crimes with apartment-house neighbors, family complications, cats, and Cat's unfiltered opinions. Readers who enjoy a funny, down-to-earth amateur sleuth can follow her through Two Points for Murder, Five-Alarm Fire, Eight Miles High, and later returns such as Nine Lives.

She also wrote the Gilda Liberty mysteries under the name Della Borton. Those books, beginning with Fade to Black, center on a small-town Ohio movie-theater owner. Film remains one of Borton's recurring interests, along with the way local history, old grudges, and ordinary routines can hide trouble in plain sight.

Her later work stretches beyond the cozy mystery format. Smoke follows a woman with a past in art theft who is drawn back into a dangerous puzzle involving paintings stolen during the Iranian Revolution. In Second Coming, Borton turns to comic science fiction, sending two aliens, one of whom looks remarkably like Elvis Presley, into a baffling modern America.

Houston returns to the foreground in Bayou City Burning. Set in 1961, it introduces private investigator Harry Lark and his twelve-year-old daughter, Dizzy, as their separate cases brush against the city's NASA ambitions, organized crime, and the civil rights era.

Borton is now retired from teaching and continues to write, research girl detectives, garden, and practice aikido. Her books tend to make room for humor, stubborn investigators, messy communities, and the useful idea that experience counts for a lot.