Handcrafted Mystery Books in Order

Handcrafted Mystery is Penny Reid's cozy mystery spin off from the Winston Brothers world, featuring fan favorites Cletus Winston and Jennifer Sylvester after their romance in Beard Science. The series is also known as Solving for Pie, a nod to Jenn's baking skills and the way every case seems to involve food, family, and a bit of chaos.

The stories pick up once Cletus and Jenn are engaged and trying to plan their future. In Engagement and Espionage, Green Valley's farms are being sabotaged by an unknown culprit, leaving ruined crops and plenty of bad blood between neighbors. Jenn and Cletus start poking around out of self interest, since the bakery depends on local ingredients, but soon find themselves sorting through motives, secrets, and a whole lot of dead chickens.

Marriage and Murder raises the stakes by dropping a body into the middle of their engagement celebrations. What should have been a straightforward march toward the altar turns into a tangle of suspects, old grudges, and dangerous alliances. Between dodging bullets, soothing feuding in laws, and trying to keep their own relationship steady, Cletus and Jenn have their hands full.

Although there is real peril, the tone stays firmly on the cozy side. The books lean on eccentric side characters, small town gossip, and Cletus's Rube Goldberg style schemes to generate both clues and laughs. Jenn brings a quieter, steadier energy, using her kindness and attention to detail to notice what others miss.

Readers who love Green Valley will find plenty of cameos from the Winston siblings and townsfolk, but the mysteries are structured so that new readers can follow along without having every romance from the main series memorized. Handcrafted Mystery offers an appealing mix of slow burn domesticity, sleuthing, and the reassuring promise that, in the end, both the case and the couple will come together.