Jennifer Graeser Dornbush Books in Order

If you want to meet Emily Hartford at the beginning: The Coroner → Secret Remains → Last One Alive
If you want the darker later mysteries: Frozen Lives → What Darkness Does
If you want a standalone, true-crime inspired thriller: Hole in the Woods
If you want a quick anthology sampler: Hotel California

Jennifer Graeser Dornbush grew up in Fremont, Michigan, in a house that also served as her father's medical examiner office. Death investigation was part of ordinary family life, paperwork on the table, evidence stored close by, and stories from cases drifting into the day. It gave her an unusually direct view of how crime, grief, and small-town life overlap.

She really did grow up around death.

When she was eight, she helped at an airplane crash scene, an early lesson that stayed with her for years. Over the next two decades, she kept absorbing the practical side of forensic work, not from television, but from real investigations and the people who handled them.

For a while, storytelling took the long way around. She worked in journalism and teaching before turning seriously to screenwriting, the point where her crime-world background and her creative life finally met. Wanting a stronger technical foundation, she studied at the Forensic Science Academy in Los Angeles and added formal training to the experience she already had from home.

That training turned into a book.

Her nonfiction guide Forensic Speak grew out of that work and became a practical resource for writers, filmmakers, students, and investigators who want the details right. She has also developed film and television projects and worked as a forensic consultant for TV writers, helping bridge the gap between what looks good on screen and what actually makes sense in an investigation.

Her fiction carries that same mix of accuracy and human pressure. In The Coroner, Secret Remains, Frozen Lives, and What Darkness Does, she follows Emily Hartford, a Chicago surgeon and coroner's daughter who keeps getting pulled back to her Michigan hometown and the deaths no one else can quite explain. Readers tend to come for the forensic angle, but they stay for the emotional part, old grief, family knots, unfinished love stories, and the way a small town can make every case personal.

She also writes beyond Emily Hartford's world. Hole in the Woods takes its spark from a real Michigan murder case that haunted her hometown for decades, then turns that history into a cold-case thriller about justice, trauma, and what time does to memory. Earlier in her career, she also wrote the film and novel God Bless the Broken Road, which shows how comfortably she moves between books and screen work.

A lot of her stories circle the same questions. What do the dead leave behind? What do the living owe them? And how do people keep going after violence, loss, or years without answers? Even when the material is dark, she returns again and again to resilience, hope, and the stubborn human need to make sense of what happened.

These days, she works as an author, screenwriter, speaker, and forensic specialist, and she frequently talks about crime fiction and forensics for writers and readers. She splits her time between Arizona and Michigan, which somehow feels right for a writer whose work lives between two worlds too, the everyday and the unsettling, the warm surface and whatever is buried underneath.