Julie Kramer Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Stalking Susan → Missing Mark → Silencing Sam → Killing Kate
If you want to continue after that: Shunning Sarah → Delivering Death
If you like newsroom pressure and ratings wars: Stalking Susan → Silencing Sam → Delivering Death
If you prefer darker, more eerie cases: Killing Kate → Shunning Sarah

Julie Kramer grew up on a corn and cattle farm near the Minnesota-Iowa state line, in a family that had worked that land for generations. She has said some of her happiest childhood days were the ones when the bookmobile arrived, especially if it carried another Phyllis A. Whitney novel. That mix of rural life, suspense reading, and waiting for the next good story stayed with her.

She was a reader first.

Before she published fiction, Kramer spent years in television news. She ran WCCO-TV's investigative unit in Minneapolis and later worked as a freelance network news producer for NBC and CBS. That meant investigations, live television, and stories built on short deadlines. She has said the job taught her how newsrooms really make decisions when the pressure is on.

It also taught her how to listen. In her own account, interviewing hundreds of people, often on the best or worst days of their lives, helped her hear the little turns of phrase that make dialogue feel real. Deadlines stopped scaring her. Research became second nature. And because she had seen so much odd, messy human behavior in real life, she did not feel the need to make fiction too tidy.

The move into fiction was not quick or easy. Kramer has said that, like a lot of journalists, she figured there was probably a novel in there somewhere, but writing one turned out to be harder than reporting. When she got serious, she spent about a year rereading debut mysteries she admired and checking out craft books from the library. She wrote quietly for a long time, and only a few people knew what she was doing. Then Stalking Susan arrived in 2008 and introduced the character who would define much of her fiction.

When that book appeared, it also made clear what Kramer wanted to do differently. She has said she was tired of fictional TV reporters being treated as shallow side characters who exist only to annoy readers or get killed off early. So she built Riley Spartz, the heroine of Stalking Susan, Missing Mark, Silencing Sam, Killing Kate, Shunning Sarah, and Delivering Death. The newsroom details are a big part of the fun, but so is Riley herself, smart, stubborn, funny, and always one bad break away from trouble.

Minnesota is all over her books.

The Riley Spartz novels show how flexible that setup can be. Stalking Susan turns a cold-case pattern into a serial killer hunt. Missing Mark starts with a never-worn wedding dress and becomes a sharp missing-person story. Silencing Sam folds media gossip and workplace rivalry into a murder case, while Killing Kate pulls in the eerie Black Angel legend from Iowa. Later books like Shunning Sarah and Delivering Death keep pushing Riley into stranger, darker situations, but they also keep asking a question Kramer knows well from journalism: what is the cost of turning real pain into news?

Her success came in plain, measurable ways. Stalking Susan won the Minnesota Book Award and the RT Reviewers' Choice Award for Best First Mystery. Kramer also won the Daphne du Maurier Award, and her work has been nominated for the Anthony, Barry, Shamus, Mary Higgins Clark, and RT Best Amateur Sleuth awards. She lives with her family in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.