Kat Campbell Books in Order

The Kat Campbell books are small-town crime novels set in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, a place that looks quiet until it very much is not. Kat is the local police chief, and one of the pleasures of the series is that she knows the town from the inside. She is not dropped into an unfamiliar case from somewhere else. She already has roots, history, and people to protect, which makes every investigation feel personal from the start.

Perry Hollow matters as much as any suspect.

In Death Notice, that sleepy setting is jolted awake by the town's first murder in years, a grotesque killing linked to an obituary writer who receives word of the victim's death before it happens. That setup tells you a lot about what Todd Ritter likes to do in this series. The mysteries are clever and fast-moving, but they also have a gothic streak, with coffins, fire, old grief, and the sense that local legends can turn real very quickly.

Kat is the anchor. She is competent, stubborn, and more vulnerable than she likes to admit, especially when the job collides with her life as a mother. Perry Hollow is full of recurring relationships that give the books their texture, from her connection to obituary writer Henry Goll to the help, and the friction, that come with outside investigators like Nick Donnelly. Ritter keeps the focus on solving the case, but he also lets the emotional fallout carry over from one book to the next.

Nothing in Perry Hollow stays buried for long.

Bad Moon widens the lens by turning back to an old disappearance, the case of Charlie Olmstead, who vanished on the night of the moon landing. What starts as a cold case becomes a deeper look at memory, family loyalty, and the stories a town tells itself when the truth is too hard to face. By the time Devil's Night brings murder, arson, and town history crashing together at the local museum, the series has settled into a clear rhythm: each book stands alone, but each one also deepens Perry Hollow and Kat's place inside it.

The tone sits somewhere between police procedural and dark community thriller. These are not cozy mysteries. They move fast, the crimes are sometimes grisly, and the stakes feel real, but the books are driven by character and place rather than pure shock. If you like strong local atmosphere, ongoing relationships, and twisty investigations that keep circling back to old wounds, the Kat Campbell series is an easy one to sink into.