Kate Weller/Marked For Retribution Books in Order

The Kate Weller, or Marked for Retribution, series centers on a private investigator who is as much on the run from her past as she is chasing suspects. These mysteries blend coastal settings, cold cases, and long-buried family secrets with a thread of gentle romance.

When readers first meet Kate, she has just signed on with Price Investigations and changed her name to keep a dangerous figure from tracking her down. Her first solo case sends her to Charleston, where she rents a room over a waterfront restaurant while searching for an adopted client’s biological siblings. The missing relatives are only the beginning. Petty acts of vandalism against her landlord’s family restaurant escalate into a lethal attack, and Kate finds herself protecting both her client and her new neighbors while trying not to reveal how fragile her own safety really is.

The second book pushes her even closer to the trauma she has spent years trying to forget. A wealthy socialite is found dead aboard her yacht in Pensacola, and the victim’s daughter hires Kate to prove she is not the killer. At the same time, Kate uses the trip home to revisit the robbery homicide that put her brother in prison sixteen years earlier. As therapy uncovers repressed memories, she begins to suspect the official story is wrong and that someone will do anything to keep the truth buried.

In the third outing, a wealthy host invites the whole Price Investigations crew and their partners to his private Georgia island for what is billed as a murder mystery weekend. The game quickly turns real. While Kate is delayed on the mainland, her colleagues are isolated with a killer who is using an old unsolved crime as the script. Cut off from them, she has to piece together what is happening on Elysian Island and find a way to stop it before anyone else dies.

Across the series, Kate’s complicated relationship with Charleston chef Eric Manfredi adds warmth and tension. She cares deeply for him but fears that anyone close to her becomes a target, especially as anonymous threats resurface. Her loyalty to her imprisoned brother, her growing confidence as an investigator, and her struggle to accept help give the books an emotional backbone.

Marked for Retribution reads like a bridge between classic private-eye stories and cozier mysteries. Expect waterfront apartments and luxury yachts rather than smoky offices, but also expect Kate to do the legwork herself, following hunches through Southern streets, courtrooms, and storm-tossed marinas as she searches for justice.