Eva Gates Books in Order

If you want to start at the very beginning: By Book or By Crook → Booked for Trouble → Reading Up a Storm
If you love wedding and family drama in your cozies: Something Read, Something Dead → Deadly Ever After → Death Knells and Wedding Bells
If you enjoy spooky lighthouses and buried secrets: The Spook in the Stacks → Read and Buried → Death By Beach Read
If you prefer to sample the newest stories first: Death Knells and Wedding Bells → The Stranger in the Library → Shot Through the Book → Whose Body in the Library

Eva Gates is the cozy mystery pen name of Canadian crime writer Vicki Delany, best known for the Lighthouse Library mysteries set in a lighthouse turned library on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Under both names she has become a national bestseller in the United States and a familiar presence for mystery readers in Canada and beyond. Between her various series she has written more than forty mystery novels, ranging from village puzzles to modern police stories and historical adventures.

Delany was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1951 and grew up in Canada, eventually building a career as a computer programmer and systems analyst for a major bank. For years she juggled that demanding job with raising three daughters on her own. Writing fit into the cracks of the week, often on quiet Sunday afternoons at a small desk with a cup of tea and some favorite music playing nearby.

For a long time she called herself a Sunday writer, slowly learning the craft one chapter at a time.

As her children grew up, she found more space for stories. She began with stand alone suspense novels such as Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory, which draw on northern Ontario settings and family secrets. She then created the Constable Molly Smith police procedurals, starting with In the Shadow of the Glacier, set in a small British Columbia mountain town. Those books let her explore darker crimes and questions of justice while still keeping a strong sense of place.

Over time she gravitated toward lighter, warmer mysteries. As Vicki Delany she launched the Year Round Christmas books, the Tea by the Sea series set on Cape Cod, and the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop mysteries, each centered on a vivid location and a tight knit community. She later added the Catskill Summer Resort stories, set at a 1950s vacation hotel in New York state, which mix nostalgia, show business, and the occasional body in the shadows. Readers come back for her observant, quietly funny take on everyday life, from bakery kitchens and holiday shops to seaside inns and book lined storefronts.

Writing as Eva Gates, she turned to the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library and its resident librarian, Lucy Richardson. The series opens with By Book or By Crook, in which Lucy leaves a polished Boston life for a fresh start among sand dunes, sea air, and rare books. Across the Lighthouse Library novels, readers follow Lucy, the library cat Charles, and a circle of friends as they balance book clubs and author events with stolen first editions, long buried secrets, and the occasional storm tossed night. Each story uses the classic novel the book club is reading as a playful echo to the case at hand, from Jane Austen favorites to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Books and community sit at the heart of everything she writes. Whether the mystery unfolds in a lighthouse, a tea room, a Christmas town, or a Sherlock themed shop, her stories usually pair amateur sleuths with found families, gentle humor, and just enough danger to keep the pages turning. Her tone stays inviting and clear, even when the crimes reach back through decades of local history.

Delany has been deeply involved in the crime writing world, serving as a past president of Crime Writers of Canada and co founding the Women Killing It crime writing festival in Prince Edward County. In 2019 she received the Derrick Murdoch Award for her contributions to Canadian crime fiction. Now based in rural Prince Edward County, Ontario, she writes full time, walks the local country roads, visits libraries and festivals, and keeps sending Lucy and her other sleuths into new trouble.