Debbi Mack Books in Order

If you want the main legal mystery arc: Identity Crisis → Least Wanted → Riptide → Deep Six
If you prefer a rougher private eye series: Damaged Goods → Fatal Connections
If you want a standalone thriller: The Planck Factor
If you're picking one for younger readers: Invisible Me
If you want short fiction and film writing: Five Uneasy Pieces → I Found it at the Movies

Debbi Mack is a crime writer, screenwriter, podcaster, and former attorney whose stories often start in everyday working life and then turn dangerous. She was born in Queens, New York, and has said her teen years were spent in various places. That slightly unsettled feeling turns up in her fiction too.

Before writing novels, Mack worked a long list of jobs: waitress, photography model, substitute school bus driver, typist, freelance writer, reference librarian, and attorney. She practiced law for nine years, and that experience stuck. While working as a lawyer, she began imagining a mystery series about an attorney who would have to investigate crimes, not just argue cases.

That character became Sam McRae.

Mack eventually left law to pursue writing full time, and her debut novel, Identity Crisis, grew out of that legal-world idea. The book introduced Maryland lawyer Stephanie Ann “Sam” McRae and dropped her into murder, identity theft, and a case that kept getting bigger. In 2011, Identity Crisis reached the New York Times ebook bestseller list. That same summer, Least Wanted became a Kindle bestseller in the U.S. and the U.K.

The Sam McRae books, including Riptide and Deep Six, are legal mysteries with a hardboiled streak. Mack uses Maryland settings, class tension, local corruption, and the gap between what the law can do and what justice should do. Sam is tough, sarcastic, and stubborn, but she also feels like a working professional with bills, bad luck, and clients who need real help.

Mack has never stayed in one lane. She wrote Invisible Me, a middle grade and young adult novel about Portia Maddox, a 13-year-old albino military brat who wants to fit in, and The Planck Factor, a science-based thriller about a graduate student caught up in dangerous research. Later she launched the Erica Jensen mysteries with Damaged Goods, a Shamus Award nominee, and Fatal Connections. Erica is a Marine veteran turned unlicensed private eye, and those books dig into trauma, recovery, and survival.

She keeps coming back to outsiders, underdogs, and women who refuse to quit.

Outside the novels, Mack has written short stories, including one nominated for a Derringer Award, and gathered them in Five Uneasy Pieces. She also wrote I Found it at the Movies, a conversational guide to classic film noir. For years she reviewed books for Mystery Scene Magazine. She hosts the Crime Cafe podcast, where she talks with crime, suspense, thriller, and true crime writers, and she has also adapted Identity Crisis for the screen.

Her personal story has its own sharp turns. Mack is a stroke survivor and lives with dystonia, a rare movement disorder. In 2009, she organized a fundraiser for a dystonia group, inspired in part by the film Ikiru. She now lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her husband and cats. She still seems drawn to stories about pressure, choice, and people trying to do the right thing when the easy option would be to walk away.