Erica Ruth Neubauer Books in Order

If you want the full Jane Wunderly arc: Murder at the Mena House → Murder at Wedgefield Manor → Danger on the Atlantic → Intrigue in Istanbul
If you want glamorous armchair travel mysteries: Murder at the Mena House → Danger on the Atlantic → Vengeance in Venice
If you want a shorter holiday detour: Murder at Wedgefield Manor → Murder Under the Mistletoe
If you prefer darker, more modern crime: Two Bodies Are Better Than One → Dead Men Can't Deadlift

Erica Ruth Neubauer is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and her road to fiction was not a straight one. She joined the military at 19 and spent eleven years there, later worked nearly two years as a police officer in Maryland, and taught high school English for a year before publishing novels.

She came to books with a lot of real-world mileage.

Mystery stories were there early. She has said her father raised her on Agatha Christie, Masterpiece Mystery, and old black and white detective movies. That mix of sharp clues, suspicious strangers, and stylish settings still shows up all through her fiction.

Before turning to fiction, Neubauer spent years reviewing crime and mystery novels for outlets including Publishers Weekly, Mystery Scene Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. That gave her a close view of the genre from the reader's side first. By the time she started writing seriously, she already knew the pleasures of a well-built puzzle, and how quickly a mystery can go flat if the people at its center do not feel real.

The jump from reader to novelist came from a vivid image she could not shake. She has talked about seeing, in her mind, 1920s Egypt, slow fans turning overhead, elegant travelers in a hotel, and a dead body spoiling the mood. While reading Ashley Weaver's Murder at the Brightwell, she realized she wanted to write that kind of historical mystery herself. Jane Wunderly started taking shape from there.

Research became part of the fun.

For Murder at the Mena House, she dug into period film and old material about the Mena House Hotel, then traveled to Egypt, where details like Cairo's tram system and the hotel's golf course helped sharpen the world of the book. The novel introduced independent widow Jane Wunderly and won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Neubauer kept the series moving with Murder at Wedgefield Manor, Danger on the Atlantic, Intrigue in Istanbul, Secrets of a Scottish Isle, and later adventures that send Jane and the mysterious Redvers through glamorous places with murder waiting at the other end. She has said she wants readers to feel fun and escape, and that balance between pleasure and peril is a big part of the series' appeal.

Neubauer is not tied to one flavor of mystery. With Two Bodies Are Better Than One, she launched the Lorraine Highsmith books, a darker and more sardonic series set in late 1980s Wisconsin. It swaps steamship lounges and grand hotels for a dead private investigator, a small-town police case, and an older advice columnist with a mob-shadowed past.

There is a reason her books feel both playful and grounded. She has worked inside institutions, watched how people talk around trouble, and spent years thinking about what makes crime fiction tick. Even when her settings are glamorous, she likes to tuck ordinary fear, vanity, greed, and bad decisions inside them. She lives in Milwaukee, and when she is not writing she has said she enjoys travel, yoga, and cheese.