Holly Quinn Books in Order

If you want crafty small-town cozies: A Crafter Knits a Clue → A Crafter Hooks a Killer → A Crafter Quilts a Crime
If you love bookish Northwoods mysteries: Murder at the Lakeside Library → Long Overdue at the Lakeside Library → Read to Death at the Lakeside Library
If coastal Maine sounds perfect: Digging Up Daisy → Murder Under the Mistletoe
If you want twisty friendship and neighborhood suspense: Lie In The Tide → Lie In The Bay

Holly Quinn is a mystery writer who works under three names, Holly Quinn, Holly Danvers, and Sherry Lynn. She is a New England native, and she has said she grew up devouring mystery novels from her local library. That early reading life still shows in the kinds of stories she tells now, stories built around close communities, hidden histories, and women who wind up asking more questions than the people around them would like.

She later studied business and marketing at Carroll University in Wisconsin, a practical background that sits neatly beside the very bookish world of her fiction. Before these cozy series found their audience, she had already published two standalone novels under another persona. Writing under more than one name has let her separate different corners of the mystery shelf while keeping the same love of suspense at the center.

Reading came first.

In interviews, Quinn has said that her love of mysteries pushed her to try writing one herself, and that her agent encouraged her to lean into cozy crime because the voice felt like a natural fit. That advice led to A Crafter Knits a Clue, the first Handcrafted Mystery. With Samantha Kane returning home, taking over a craft store, and stumbling into murder almost at once, the book established a pattern Quinn would keep using well, strong setting, everyday work, loyal friends, and a puzzle that keeps tightening.

She kept building from there. In the Handcrafted books, including A Crafter Hooks a Killer and A Crafter Quilts a Crime, readers get a small Wisconsin town, craft talk, family dynamics, and a gentle thread of romance alongside the sleuthing. The Lakeside Library novels, beginning with Murder at the Lakeside Library and continuing through Long Overdue at the Lakeside Library and Read to Death at the Lakeside Library, shift to Lofty Pines, Wisconsin, where Rain Wilmot navigates grief, local gossip, and murder around a lakeside library that feels like a character in its own right.

Then she widened the map.

As Sherry Lynn, Quinn moved to the coast of Maine for the Mainely Murder books. Digging Up Daisy and Murder Under the Mistletoe follow landscaper Kinsley Clark through seaside inn life, town events, flower beds, and crimes that threaten the people she cares about. Quinn has said that those books were inspired in part by her love of gardening and by a house her aunt had on the Maine coast, which helps explain why the setting feels so rooted in salt air, local color, and everyday coastal routines.

She also writes domestic suspense as Holly Danvers. With Lie In The Tide and Lie In The Bay, she steps away from the softer shape of the cozy and into sharper, more tense stories about friendships, neighbors, buried secrets, and the trouble that starts when old lies stop staying put. Even there, the interests are familiar, layered relationships, strong sense of place, and the slow reveal of what people are hiding from one another.

Across all of these names, Quinn's recurring themes are easy to spot. She likes communities that look safe from the outside, returning-home stories, complicated loyalties, and characters who have to protect friends or family while figuring out whom they can trust. Readers often come to her for the mix of comfort and tension, craft stores, libraries, gardens, lake cabins, and seaside neighborhoods, all carrying more history than they first appear to.

She now lives in the Midwest with her husband and keeps writing across more than one kind of mystery. When she is not at the keyboard, she has said she enjoys painting, gardening, and long walks in the woods or by the beach. That mix of quiet routine and deep attachment to place shows up all over her books.