Esri Allbritten Books in Order

If you want the main mystery series: Chihuahua of the Baskervilles → The Portrait of Doreene Gray
If you want the creepiest mansion mystery first: The Portrait of Doreene Gray
If you want a standalone with Tarot and a more personal supernatural twist: Jokers & Fools

Esri Allbritten writes oddball mysteries and paranormal-leaning stories with a comic streak. Her books tend to begin with a premise that sounds impossible, then let a very human mess unfold underneath it. You can see that mix in Chihuahua of the Baskervilles, The Portrait of Doreene Gray, and the standalone Jokers & Fools.

Before she published as Esri Allbritten, she wrote two earlier novels under the name Esri Rose. Those books imagined elves living in Boulder, Colorado, which says a lot about the territory she likes: ordinary places nudged a little sideways by the uncanny. Boulder stayed in the picture when she shifted genres.

She later turned toward mystery and built a fictional world around Tripping Magazine, a publication that covers spooky travel stories and weird local legends. In her own author Q and A, she explained that the cases may look paranormal on the surface, but the real answer usually comes back to human motives. She also said she more or less taught herself mystery writing through an early unpublished manuscript before landing on the version of the idea that became her series.

That sense of play matters.

Allbritten clearly likes classic horror and mystery titles, ghost lore, and towns with strong personalities. She has said she enjoys discovering quirky real-life places and wreaking fictional havoc in them. That approach shapes Chihuahua of the Baskervilles, with its Colorado ghost-dog case, and The Portrait of Doreene Gray, which takes the Tripping crew to rainy Port Townsend for an eerie portrait and a house full of secrets.

Jokers & Fools shows another side of her interests. It follows LeeLee Moldovar, who starts reading Tarot for a living after her mother's death and the loss of her job, only to find herself dealing with a voice she cannot explain. Even away from the Tripping Magazine setup, Allbritten is still drawn to the moment where ordinary disappointment collides with something strange.

She also seems drawn to characters who do not fit neatly together: believers and skeptics, romantics and eye-rollers, people who are a little messy but still willing to keep digging. That gives her stories snap. It also keeps the odd premises tied to recognizable feelings like jealousy, grief, hope, and embarrassment.

Chihuahuas help, too.

In one interview, she admitted that choosing the breed was partly a smart hook and partly genuine affection. She later got her own Chihuahua, Josie O, and that fondness shows in the way the dogs in her books work as comic sidekicks, emotional anchors, and occasional chaos agents. The result is mystery writing that does not take itself too seriously, even when the stakes are real.

Off the page, her author notes make her sound much like her fiction: amused, curious, and willing to laugh at herself. She has written about liking sushi, bowling, and marimba, and she even invented a folk-singing alter ego, Jenny Blossom, to write songs connected to her fictional magazine. Those details fit the voice of her books, which enjoy the ridiculous edges of everyday life as much as the mystery itself. Early author bios place her in Boulder with her husband, cat, and Chihuahua, and later posts say her family moved to Albuquerque during the pandemic. Wherever she is writing from, the appeal of her work stays consistent: eerie setups, sharp banter, and communities full of local color, where the supernatural may be the bait, but people are always the real story.