Duffy Brown Books in Order

If you're new to Duffy Brown: Iced Chiffon → Killer in Crinolines → Pearls and Poison
If you love Savannah-set cozies: Iced Chiffon → Pearls and Poison → Demise in Denim → Lethal in Old Lace
If you want island bikes and fudge shops: Geared for the Grave → Braking for Bodies → Tandem Demise
If you prefer quick reads and novellas: Dead Man Walker → Wedding Day and Foul Play
If you enjoy recipes with your mysteries: Tea Time with the Cozy Chicks → The Cozy Chicks Picnic

Duffy Brown grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and turned a lifelong love of mysteries into warm, funny stories about women rebuilding their lives. Her novels are packed with small town gossip, second hand treasures, and more than a few inconvenient dead bodies.

Mysteries, not movie stars, were always her favorite escape.

Before she wrote about consignment shops and bicycle tours, Brown spent years teaching and publishing romance novels under the name Dianne Castell. Those early books helped her learn how to balance humor, heart, and a solid plot, and they introduced her to the devoted readers who would later follow her into crime fiction. Moving into mysteries let her lean even harder into the puzzle solving side of storytelling that had always drawn her in as a reader.

Her breakout cozy series, the Consignment Shop Mysteries, begins with Iced Chiffon and drops readers straight into historic Savannah. Newly divorced Reagan Summerside is left with a crumbling Victorian house, a closet full of designer clothes, and almost no cash, so she turns the ground floor into the Prissy Fox consignment shop to stay afloat. The shop gives Reagan a way to rebuild her life, but it also turns into a crossroads where secrets, grudges, and the occasional body tend to land.

From there the series leans into everything Brown enjoys about Southern settings, from front porch gossip to courthouse politics and church suppers. Reagan’s flamboyant Aunt KiKi, her no nonsense mother Judge Gloria Summerside, and her lazy rescue dog BW keep the Prissy Fox humming while local attorney Walker Boone complicates both her love life and her investigations in books like Killer in Crinolines, Pearls and Poison, Demise in Denim, Lethal in Old Lace, and Wedding Day and Foul Play. The mix of humor, danger, and slow burn romance is a big part of what keeps readers coming back.

Brown’s second mystery series, the Cycle Path Mysteries, trades magnolias for lake breezes. In Geared for the Grave, Braking for Bodies, and Tandem Demise, Chicago transplant Evie Bloomfield lands on car free Mackinac Island to help at Rudy’s Rides bike shop, only to collide with suspicious deaths, old grudges from Detroit, and a stubborn but honorable police chief named Nate Sutter. The island’s no car rule, fudge shops, and grand hotels give these books a distinctly different flavor while keeping the same light touch and fast pace.

Across both series, Brown keeps the tone light on gore and heavy on quick dialogue, community ties, and found family.

Alongside the fiction, she has cooked up recipe collections with fellow cozy writers in projects like Tea Time with the Cozy Chicks and The Cozy Chicks Picnic, where recipes sit next to glimpses of beloved characters. Her debut mystery Iced Chiffon was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best First Novel, a nod from the traditional mystery community that arrived early in her crime writing career and confirmed that her shift from romance to mystery had struck a chord.

Brown still lives in the Cincinnati area, in Milford, Ohio, with her husband. She has worked in a real consignment shop, the sort of place where a tossed off comment or an odd item on a rack can spark a scene, and she shares her home with two cats named Spooky and Dr. Watson. Even her car hints at her favorite detective, thanks to a Sherlok vanity plate. When she is not drafting new adventures for Reagan and Evie, she is often talking with readers, visiting the real life Savannah squares and Mackinac Island streets that inspire her books, or simply enjoying the everyday details that might become tomorrow’s twist.