Eleanor Kuhns Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: A Simple Murder → Death of a Dyer → Cradle to Grave
If you want the Shaker-centered books: A Simple Murder → The Shaker Murders → Simply Dead
If you want bigger trips beyond Maine: Death in Salem → Death in the Great Dismal → Murder, Sweet Murder
If you want her Ancient Crete mysteries: In the Shadow of the Bull → On The Horns of Death

Eleanor Kuhns came to published fiction after years of working in and around books. She earned a master's in Library Science from Columbia University, spent much of her career at Goshen Public Library in Orange County, New York, and later moved into writing full time. That long library life shows in her fiction. She likes research, knows how to follow a thread, and has a clear affection for the odd corners of history that most people skip past.

Books were never a side interest for her.

Kuhns has said she wrote her first story at ten, and she kept going. For years she wrote science fiction while building her working life as a librarian. The big shift came when mystery, history, and her love of old crafts all started pulling in the same direction. Instead of leaving those interests separate, she put them together.

A visit to the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake in Maine helped give her a way in. Hearing stories connected to that community sent her down a research path that eventually became A Simple Murder. The book won the 2011 Minotaur Books and Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel competition, which is a pretty direct way to announce yourself. It also introduced Will Rees, a former Revolutionary War soldier and traveling weaver, one of Kuhns's best ideas.

From there she built the long-running Will Rees books, including Death of a Dyer, Death in Salem, Death in the Great Dismal, Murder on Principle, and The Long Shadow of Murder. Readers who click with these novels usually like the same mix of things: solid mystery plotting, daily life in the early republic, and characters who carry family strain with them wherever they go. Her books make room for farm work, weaving, childbirth, religion, gossip, slavery, and the rough limits of the law, all without losing the pull of the whodunit.

She also knows her way around textiles.

Kuhns has said that weaving is one of her hobbies, which helps explain why Will Rees is not a gentleman detective or a policeman, but a working man with a loom, a temper, and a strong sense of responsibility. That choice gives the series its texture. Her investigators notice labor, money, hunger, and the way a small community can close ranks when trouble starts.

She later moved even farther back in time with her Ancient Crete mysteries, beginning with In the Shadow of the Bull and continuing with On The Horns of Death. These books follow Martis, a teenage bull leaper in training, through a Bronze Age world of ritual, trade, family obligation, and murder. Even with the new setting, the core interest feels familiar. Kuhns is still drawn to what ordinary life looks like inside a very different society, and to the pressure that falls on women, children, outsiders, and anyone caught between duty and truth.

Across both series, she writes historical mysteries that are curious rather than flashy. The crimes matter, but so do the worlds around them.

Now based in New York, Kuhns writes as someone who clearly enjoys finding the human story buried inside research. That may be the simplest way to describe her work. She takes a past era, gives it working people, faith, family tension, and a dead body, then lets the questions begin.