Deborah Sharp Books in Order

Deborah Sharp is a Florida native whose mysteries head away from postcard beaches and toward ranches, rodeos, small towns, and people who know everybody's business. Her home base has long been Fort Lauderdale, but the Florida on the page is the cattle-and-citrus country beyond the usual tourist routes.

She writes about a state that can be sunny, strange, and very nosy.

Before fiction, Sharp spent nearly two decades as a reporter for USA Today. She covered hurricanes and other hard news, work that meant deadlines, travel, and the responsibility of getting the facts straight. In 2004, she stepped away from the news business to tell a different kind of story, one built around humor, family friction, and a dead body or two.

That career change had an earlier turn behind it. Sharp had been in a Ph.D. program in psychology when reporting pulled her in, and she left the program for a newsroom. Later, after years of writing about real events, she had to learn the opposite skill: making up people, motives, and trouble.

The spark for her first novel came from a picture of an older woman in a turquoise convertible. Sharp imagined the woman finding a corpse in the trunk, with police deciding she looked guilty. That image became Mama Does Time in 2008, the first Mace Bauer mystery and the start of a five-book run.

Mace is the practical middle daughter in a family led by her lively, frequently married Mama. The books pair Mace's attempts to keep life orderly with cases that refuse to cooperate. In Mama Rides Shotgun, a trail ride through Florida cattle country turns deadly. Mama Gets Hitched brings murder into wedding preparations, while Mama Sees Stars sends the family into the chaos of a movie shoot. Mama Gets Trashed begins with a search through a dump and gets more complicated from there.

The appeal is partly the family banter. Mace, her sisters Maddie and Marty, and Mama can be exasperating with one another, but they close ranks when it counts. A roadside bar, a wildlife park, wedding plans, or an outdoor film set can all become the next problem to solve.

The joke is never far away, but Sharp keeps the mysteries tied to a real sense of place. Her fictional Himmarshee draws on Florida ranch country, especially the Okeechobee area and memories of her family's South Florida.

Sharp has also written short fiction and essays, and her humor commentaries have aired on public radio. She has spoken about the move from journalism to mystery writing on television, too. For research, she took a week-long horseback trail ride across Florida for Mama Rides Shotgun.

She shares her South Florida life with her husband, journalist Kerry Sanders. It is a fitting match for a writer whose stories began with a reporter's eye, then happily wandered into fiction.