Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Books in Order

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli was born in Detroit and built a writing life that has stayed closely tied to Michigan. Her mysteries often head north, into small towns, wooded roads, lake country, and communities where everybody knows a little too much about everybody else.

She studied at Macomb County Community College, Oakland University, and the University of Michigan. Later, she taught creative writing through Northwestern Michigan College's extended education program and at writers' conferences. Teaching and talking about the work has been a steady part of her career, alongside reviewing books and writing fiction.

Writing was never a casual interest for her. Buzzelli has said that she wrote fiction throughout her life, kept working at publication, joined writers' groups, took classes, and learned how to make connections in the writing world. The path involved rejected submissions, persistence, and a determination to keep sending out the next manuscript.

Her first novel, Gift of Evil, arrived in 1983. It is a darker, supernatural-leaning story about Mattie, a frightened woman whose dreams begin to reveal violent secrets. The book stands apart from Buzzelli's later cozies, but it introduces an interest that runs through much of her work: women confronting danger while trying to build a life on their own terms.

Then came the northern Michigan mysteries.

The Emily Kincaid books begin with Dead Dancing Women. Emily is a divorced journalist and would-be mystery novelist who leaves the city for a quieter life near Leetsville, Michigan, only to find that quiet can be complicated. Her friendship with Deputy Dolly Wakowski gives the series its center. The cases in Dead Floating Lovers, Dead Sleeping Shaman, Dead Dogs and Englishmen, and Dead Little Dolly mix local history, uneasy neighbors, and the practical worries of women trying to get through the day.

Buzzelli returned to bookish small-town mystery with the Little Library series. In A Most Curious Murder, Jenny Weston comes home to Bear Falls after a divorce and finds herself drawn into a murder investigation with her unusual neighbor, Zoe Zola. Later books, including She Stopped for Death, In Want of a Knife, and And Then They Were Doomed, use threads from Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, and Agatha Christie without losing sight of the friendships, family tensions, and local grudges around the central crime.

She also writes as Elizabeth Lee. Under that name, the Nut House Mysteries move to a Texas pecan farm, where plant biologist Lindy Blanchard and her grandmother, Miss Amelia, investigate trouble at the family business in A Tough Nut to Kill, Snoop to Nuts, and Nuts and Buried.

Short fiction matters to Buzzelli, too. Her stories have appeared in literary journals and other publications, and work supported by a Michigan grant was adapted for the stage and read on public radio. She has also written essays and journalism, which helps explain the grounded, observant feel of her fictional communities.

Buzzelli lives on a small lake between Mancelona and Kalkaska in northern Michigan. Crows, bears, turtles, villages, and forests are part of the landscape around her, and those details keep finding their way into the mysteries.