Karen Kijewski Books in Order

Karen Kijewski grew up in Berkeley, California, in a family where books were taken seriously. Her father, Clarence Glacken, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and she later stayed close to home for college, earning both a B.A. and an M.A. there. Publisher biographies from her novels say some of her earliest memories were library trips with her mother, which feels like a fitting beginning for someone who ended up writing smart, tough mysteries.

Books were there from the start.

Before fiction became her day job, Kijewski taught English at Brookline High School in Massachusetts for nearly ten years. She had the academic training, the reading life, and the classroom experience, but publishing did not happen overnight. What she seems to have had, more than anything, was stamina.

After moving back to California and settling in Sacramento, she decided to build her life around writing. That did not mean an easy leap into full-time authorship. For years she worked nights as a bartender while writing whenever she could, and she completed four manuscripts before the fifth finally broke through. It is a very writerly origin story, less overnight success, more stubbornness and late hours.

That fifth manuscript was Katwalk.

Published in 1989, Katwalk introduced Sacramento private investigator Kat Colorado. The book had already won the St. Martin's Press and Private Eye Writers of America first-novel contest, and in 1990 it went on to win both the Anthony Award and the Shamus Award for best first novel. It was a strong debut, but the bigger story is what came next: Kijewski stayed with Kat and built a full series through the 1990s.

Those novels include Katapult, Kat's Cradle, Copy Kat, Wild Kat, Alley Kat Blues, Honky Tonk Kat, Kat Scratch Fever, and Stray Kat Waltz. Taken together, they show what Kijewski was especially good at, starting with a human-scale problem, a missing stash of money, a family mystery, a threatened whistleblower, a suspicious death, and then letting it widen into something darker. The books move through bars, back roads, old California towns, Sacramento offices, Las Vegas neon, and even the country music world.

In Copy Kat, she sends Kat undercover as a bartender in Gold Country, which plays neatly to both the character's background and the author's own working life. Alley Kat Blues folds a suspicious death into strain in Kat's relationship with Hank Parker. Kat Scratch Fever turns a lawyer's suicide into a bigger story about blackmail and charity money. For Honky Tonk Kat, publisher material notes that Kijewski researched in Nashville and on tour with singer Lari White.

Readers who click with Kijewski usually do so because of Kat herself.

She is tough, funny, impatient, loyal, and often running on nerve after common sense has packed up and gone home. Kijewski lets her be capable without making her slick. Kat gets rattled, gets angry, makes mistakes, and keeps going. That rougher edge gives the books their life.

The setting matters too. Sacramento is not just a pin on the map in these novels. Kijewski writes it as a working city, full of bartenders, cops, reporters, lawyers, damaged families, and people who know each other's business a little too well. Again and again, her stories circle back to power, money, class, violence, and the ways women are expected to absorb damage quietly. Kat, unsurprisingly, is not very good at staying quiet.

Biographical notes from Kijewski's publishing years describe her as married, with two daughters, and based in Sacramento. She did not produce a huge shelf of books, but the ones she wrote made a real impression on mystery readers who like their private eye fiction sharp, grounded, and a little bruised. Her work fits comfortably beside the wave of late 1980s and 1990s female P.I. novels, while still feeling very much like her own.