Hugo Uyttenhove Books in Order

If you want the retirement-community mysteries: Mud Cake for Breakfast → No Tacos For Lunch → Sloppy Joe For Dinner → Juice Before Breakfast
If you want art and history intrigue: Rembrandt Redux → The Da Vinci Cloth
If you want a bigger standalone caper first: Grand Scale Larceny → Rembrandt Redux
If you want the easiest entry point: Mud Cake for Breakfast → No Tacos For Lunch

Hugo Uyttenhove was born in Belgium in 1949 and grew up there before making his first trip to the United States in 1967 on a one-year American Field Service scholarship. That early move matters because his fiction often feels written by someone who has lived between places, carrying European history, American settings, and a traveler’s eye for how people talk, work, and hide things.

He later returned to the United States to study at SUNY Cortland, then earned a PhD in System Science from Binghamton University. Before he published fiction, he had already written technical books, and that background shows in the way he builds plots. His stories like systems. Small details connect. A clue in one corner usually matters somewhere else.

Writing fiction came later.

By his own account, the push came from a friend in Hollywood who urged him to write a screenplay. He tried that route first, but the format felt too thin for the kind of story he wanted to tell. He wanted room for people, places, backstory, and the odd fact that makes a mystery feel lived in. So he wrote the full novel first and also spent time at Writer's Boot Camp in Los Angeles, where he kept working on screenplays alongside the books.

His first published thriller was Grand Scale Larceny in 2010. It is a big, international story about stolen Flemish masterworks, murder, and organized crime, and it set up several things that would become familiar in his fiction: a love of art history, a taste for theft and forgery plots, and a habit of placing ordinary people near very expensive, very dangerous objects. Readers who enjoy that book tend to like the mixture of research, movement, and high stakes.

He kept building on that approach in the Tom Arden novels, especially Rembrandt Redux and The Da Vinci Cloth. Those books move through the art world, where questions of authenticity, ownership, and provenance can be as tense as any chase scene. In Rembrandt Redux, the spark is a possible Rembrandt. In The Da Vinci Cloth, it is an embroidered cloth tied to an old legend and a dangerous search. What pulls readers in is not just the puzzle, but the way Uyttenhove treats art as something fought over by curators, dealers, criminals, and believers.

Art keeps pulling him back.

He also writes in a different key with the Carolina Arbors mysteries, including Mud Cake for Breakfast, No Tacos For Lunch, and Juice Before Breakfast. These books trade museums and international intrigue for a 55+ community in North Carolina, where gossip travels fast and a local book club is never far from the action. Detective Travis Vinder handles the official investigation, but the neighborhood keeps pressing in with theories, suspicions, and half-helpful observations. The tone is warmer and more local, but the crimes are still serious.

Uyttenhove has long made his home in North Carolina with his wife, Kristin Conrad. Across the different series, he keeps returning to the same things he seems to enjoy most: smart puzzles, unusual settings, cultural history, and people who think they understand a situation until one missing detail changes everything.