Kat Colorado Books in Order

Kat Colorado is the center of Karen Kijewski's one long-running series, and she is a good guide to it. She is a Sacramento private investigator with a past in journalism and bartending, which means she knows how to ask hard questions, read a room, and stay standing when things get ugly. From Katwalk onward, her cases rarely feel abstract. Somebody she knows, or somebody close to somebody she knows, is usually already hurting before Kat even walks in.

That personal angle is the engine of the series.

The books are set mostly in and around Sacramento, and the city matters. Kijewski uses it as a working place, not a postcard, with freeways, bars, neighborhoods, small offices, courtrooms, and long drives out toward the Delta, the foothills, or Las Vegas. Even when the series travels, as it does in books like Alley Kat Blues and Honky Tonk Kat, Kat still feels rooted in Northern California. The setting gives the stories a grounded, lived-in feel, and it helps the series stand apart from more generic private eye fiction.

Kat herself is tough, sarcastic, and not much interested in playing nice for the sake of it. But she is not a cool machine. The series lets her be shaken, stubborn, wrong, loyal, and deeply affected by the people around her. Recurring characters help give the books their shape, especially advice columnist Charity Collins, Kat's self-appointed grandmother Alma Flaherty, and the cop Hank Parker, whose relationship with Kat adds warmth, friction, and real emotional stakes.

The cases vary a lot. One book starts with missing divorce money, another with the murder of Kat's adopted cousin, another with a client trying to uncover her own parentage. Later books move into corporate wrongdoing, blackmail, stalkers, suspected domestic abuse, and the country music scene. What links them is Kijewski's interest in pressure points: money, secrecy, shame, family history, and the way power can hide behind respectability. The crimes are serious, but the books keep close to the ordinary lives that get torn up by them.

Kat solves cases, but she carries them too.

That is a big part of the series' tone. These are hard-boiled mysteries, but not chilly ones. There is wit, plenty of sharp talk, and a good eye for hypocrisy, yet there is also grief, fatigue, and loyalty running underneath. The series sits squarely in the late 1980s and 1990s wave of female private eye fiction, but it does not feel like a copy of bigger names. Kijewski's version is scrappier and more local. She likes side streets, flawed friends, and jobs that begin as favors and turn poisonous.

If you like private eye novels where the heroine is competent without being invincible, and where the California setting feels specific and real, the Kat Colorado books are easy to settle into. Start with Katwalk if you want the full arc, then follow Kat as the stakes get more personal all the way to Stray Kat Waltz.