Karen Odden Books in Order

If you want a stand-alone Victorian conspiracy: A Lady in the Smoke
If you want music halls, danger, and a determined heroine: A Dangerous Duet → A Trace of Deceit
If you prefer a darker police procedural: Down a Dark River → Under a Veiled Moon
If you want a thief-led heist story: An Artful Dodge

Karen Odden spent years studying Victorian literature before she ever published a mystery, and that long route into fiction explains a lot about her books. She earned a B.A. in English from Cornell, an M.A. from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from New York University, where she focused on Victorian literature and psychoanalytic theory.

Trains were part of the story early on.

Her dissertation looked at nineteenth-century railway disasters and the way doctors, lawmakers, and writers described injury and trauma. That research eventually helped spark A Lady in the Smoke, her first novel, which opens with a train wreck and grows into a mystery about buried secrets, class, and power in Victorian England.

Before fiction took over, Odden had the sort of varied work life that feels useful for a crime writer. She worked in publishing at Harcourt Brace and McGraw-Hill, bought media for Christie's in New York, and bartended at the Rochester airport, where she has said she learned a lot by listening. She also taught English literature at New York University, the University of Michigan, and UW-Milwaukee, and spent time editing the academic journal Victorian Literature and Culture.

She was a big reader long before she was a novelist. Odden has pointed to Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt, books she found in her grandmother's library, as lasting influences. You can feel that blend in her fiction: mystery, suspense, a thread of romance, and women who are smart enough to see the trap even when the world insists they stay put.

Eventually, the research and teaching gave way to novels.

Odden sets all of her fiction in 1870s London, and she clearly likes the parts of the city that smell a little of river mud, smoke, paint, lamp oil, and trouble. A Lady in the Smoke became a USA Today bestseller. Then came A Dangerous Duet and A Trace of Deceit, books that move through music halls and the art world and center young women trying to build a life from talent, nerve, and persistence.

She later shifted to a tougher police angle with Down a Dark River, the first Inspector Corravan novel. Its hero, Michael Corravan, is a working-class Scotland Yard detective with ties to Whitechapel and the Thames, and the series leans harder into class pressure, corruption, and political conflict. Readers who like a more procedural feel often start there and continue to Under a Veiled Moon, which follows Corravan into the aftermath of the Princess Alice disaster. Down a Dark River was an Oprah Daily pick, and Under a Veiled Moon was nominated for the Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty awards for best historical mystery.

She hasn't lost interest in London's outsiders, either.

An Artful Dodge, published in 2026, turns to an all-women thieving ring in 1879 London and shows again what Odden tends to care about: hidden systems of power, chosen family, and the thin line between respectability and danger. Across her books, family secrets keep resurfacing. So do artists, musicians, reporters, police, and people trying to protect someone they love. Away from the page, she serves on the national board of Sisters in Crime, reviews books for Publishers Weekly, teaches writing workshops, and lives in Arizona while spending time in Utah. She likes to hike, and there is also, famously, a beagle named Rosy in the mix.