June Shaw Books in Order

June Shaw came to fiction after a full life that gave her plenty to write about. A longtime Louisiana writer, she has set several of her stories among the bayous and small towns of the state, where family ties, food, weather, and local gossip can all shape a plot.

Her path to publication was not a straight line. Shaw was a young widow raising five children when she completed her college degree and began teaching junior high school. Writing had been a childhood dream, but daily responsibilities came first for a long time.

She found ways to keep that dream moving. Between family life and grading papers, Shaw learned to write plays and sold short stories. Two of her one-act plays were produced Off-Off-Broadway, and she also wrote a screenplay.

Then she turned to novels.

Her first published mystery, Relative Danger, introduced Cealie Gunther, a widowed business owner and grandmother with a sharp eye, a strong independent streak, and a habit of stumbling into trouble. In the book, Cealie heads to the Chicago suburbs for her granddaughter Kat's graduation, only to find a school death that may have been murder. Solving it means taking a substitute-teaching job and asking questions that make someone very nervous.

Cealie returned in Killer Cousins and Deadly Reunion. The series mixes amateur detection with the complications of family, travel, and Cealie's uneven relationship with Gil Thurman, a restaurateur who would like their romance to be more settled than she does. Shaw gives Cealie real worries and a busy family life, but also lets her be funny, curious, and stubborn enough to follow a clue when most people would stay out of it.

Shaw later created the Twin Sisters mysteries, beginning with A Fatal Romance. Divorced twins Sunny Taylor and Eve Vaughn run a remodeling business in Sugar Ledge, Louisiana, and find that a new customer, a murder, and public suspicion can make an already stressful job much worse. Dead on the Bayou and A Manor of Murder keep the sisters working cases close to home, with their mother and her retirement-community friends often in the middle of the action.

Her books do not stay in one lane. Instructions for Love is a Louisiana romance about grief, inheritance, and a guarded plantation owner. Approaching Menace is a suspense story in which a hurricane-bound Gulf Coast and a killer force Josie Aspen to confront an old fear. With her granddaughters, Shaw also wrote the dystopian young adult novel Just One Friend, while How to Take Care of Your Pet Ghost grew from a collaboration with her granddaughter Claire.

Family matters in her nonfiction, too. Nora 102 1/2: A Lesson on Aging Well tells the story of Shaw's mother, Nora, whose full and engaged life continued despite worsening eyesight. It fits the warm, practical side of Shaw's work.

Her author biographies have also mentioned swimming, fishing, dancing, flower gardening, travel, and time with her large family. Those everyday pleasures feel at home beside the humor, close relationships, and Louisiana atmosphere that recur across her books.