Fran Stewart Books in Order

If you want a cozy librarian mystery: Orange as Marmalade → Yellow as Legal Pads → Green As a Garden Hose
If you want the big linked Martinsville saga: Red as a Rooster → Black as Soot → Pink as a Peony → White as Ice
If you want a ghostly Vermont cozy: A Wee Murder in My Shop → A Wee Dose of Death → A Wee Homicide in the Hotel
If you want a standalone historical mystery: A Slaying Song Tonight
If you want practical writing advice: From the Tip of My Pen

Fran Stewart was born in San Rafael, California, and grew up in a military family that moved often. She has described herself as someone who kept moving from birth through her fourth decade, so home was never just one town on a map. Later she studied at Illinois Wesleyan and at Trinity College in Vermont, married, and raised two children.

About 30 years before 2024, Stewart moved from Vermont to Georgia, partly because she had family there and liked the climate better. That move stuck. She has long been active in groups such as Sisters in Crime, the Atlanta Writers Club, and the National League of American Pen Women, and she now lives north of Atlanta, beside a creek near Hog Mountain, with rescued cats and the sort of quiet that seems to suit both mystery plots and memoir work.

Writing arrived later than she once expected. While recovering from surgery, a friend took her to a mystery workshop, and Stewart started writing fiction at 55. She has recalled placing a dead body within the first few pages of that early manuscript and then realizing, a little later, that the real voice on the page belonged to an orange and white cat.

That cat became Marmalade.

Marmalade helped launch Stewart's longest-running fiction world, the Biscuit McKee books. Starting with Orange as Marmalade, the series follows Georgia librarian Biscuit McKee, her cat, and the layered life of a small town where gossip travels fast and old secrets travel even faster. Readers who like cozy mysteries with warmth usually start there, and Yellow as Legal Pads later won both an Independent Publisher Book Award and a Georgia Author of the Year Award.

Stewart then shifted the mood, but not her taste for unusual setups, in the ScotShop mysteries. Beginning with A Wee Murder in My Shop, those novels center on Peggy Winn, a Vermont shop owner who comes back from Scotland with authentic wares, a tartan shawl, and a 14th-century Scottish ghost named Dirk. The books keep one foot in cozy mystery and one foot in light paranormal comedy, which turns out to be a very natural fit for Stewart's mix of humor, feeling, and everyday detail.

She has also written outside her series work. A Slaying Song Tonight is a standalone mystery set during the Great Depression and built around reporter Nancy Remington and a serial killer. From the Tip of My Pen turns Stewart's years of writing and editing into a practical workbook for other writers. Add in poetry, memoir, and beekeeping books, and you can see that she has never been especially interested in staying in one lane.

Stewart likes small towns, old secrets, animals, and the ways families keep shaping each other long after they think the story is over.

In recent years she has put more of her energy into memoirs and teaching. She has explained that the turn came after a conversation with her adult son, who admitted he did not remember a family story she was sure she had already passed along. That moment pushed her to think more seriously about memory, inheritance, and the stories ordinary people leave behind, themes that now show up in her classes as well as her later books.

These days she writes, teaches, reads, sings alto, knits, works jigsaw puzzles, and feeds the birds. She has also volunteered in her grandchildren's school libraries, which feels entirely in character for the creator of Biscuit McKee. One last detail from her official bio says a lot about her tone: she manages quite happily without a television set.