Jill Paterson Books in Order

If you want the Fitzjohn books from the beginning: The Celtic Dagger → Murder At The Rocks → Once Upon A Lie
If you want a strong Sydney police mystery: Murder At The Rocks → Deadly Investment → Lane's End
If you like arts and culture settings: Poisoned Palette → The Fourth String → Rose Scented Murder
If you prefer an amateur sleuth in a seaside town: Murder At The Beaufort

Jill Paterson was born in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, grew up in Adelaide, and later spent eleven years in Ontario before returning to Australia. That mix of places helps explain why setting matters so much in her fiction. Her books tend to know exactly where they are, and why that place matters.

After completing an Arts degree at the Australian National University, she worked at the university's School of Law. She later spent more than ten years with the Business Council of Australia and with the University of New South Wales at the ADFA campus in the School of Electrical Engineering. Before she became known for crime fiction, she had already spent years moving through workplaces where procedure, hierarchy, and personality could shape everything.

A key turn came when she entered the 2008 New Holland Publishers and NSW Writers' Centre Genre Fiction Award. The Celtic Dagger grew out of that early stage of her writing life. It began as a stand-alone mystery, but it also opened the door to the longer Alistair Fitzjohn sequence.

That series became her home ground.

Fitzjohn is not flashy.

At the center is Alistair Fitzjohn, a careful, old-school investigator who solves cases by paying attention, asking better questions, and refusing to let loose ends stay loose. Readers who enjoy traditional detective fiction often gravitate to books like Murder At The Rocks, Once Upon A Lie, and Deadly Investment because the puzzles are built from human motives rather than spectacle. Family secrets, professional rivalries, money, jealousy, and betrayals from long ago do a lot of the work.

Paterson also likes dropping murder into vivid Australian settings. Poisoned Palette moves into the art world and the Blue Mountains. The Fourth String heads into the orbit of the Sydney Symphony and a shabby old apartment building. Rose Scented Murder takes readers behind the scenes of a theatre on its final night. Even when the plot turns dark, the books keep one foot in the everyday details of work, routine, and place.

She doesn't write the same mystery over and over.

In 2020 she introduced a different sleuth with Murder At The Beaufort, the first Phoebe Chadwick mystery. Instead of a police-led investigation, that book follows a woman starting over in the seaside town of Shellcove and finding herself pulled into the death of her new business partner. It is a neat shift in scale, from police procedure to a more local, close-knit mystery, while still keeping Paterson's interest in motive and hidden history.

Across the Fitzjohn books, returning readers also get small glimpses of the detective's life beyond the case. He moves from serving as a Detective Chief Inspector to working as a consultant after retirement, and the series lets his world widen without losing the stand-alone structure of each mystery. You can dip into one book for the puzzle, or stay for the slow build of character detail.

Paterson has also written nonfiction, including Self Publishing - Pocket Guide and Writing - Painting A Picture With Words. Those titles make sense beside the novels. They suggest someone who not only writes, but also thinks hard about how books are made and how stories work on the page.

These days Paterson lives in Canberra. When she is not writing, she has said she enjoys exploring the landscapes that inspire her fiction, along with painting, photography, and tai chi. It feels fitting. Her mysteries are full of people who notice things, and that same habit of looking closely seems to run through the rest of her life as well.