Kathryn Miller Haines Books in Order

If you want WWII backstage mysteries: The War Against Miss Winter → The Winter of Her Discontent → Winter in June → When Winter Returns
If you want a teen detective on the home front: The Girl is Murder → The Girl Is Trouble
If you want a modern psychological thriller: The Girl from Yesterday

Kathryn Miller Haines grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and came to writing through theater as much as through books. She studied English and Theatre at Trinity University, then moved to Pittsburgh in 1994 for graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned an MFA in English.

For years, she was acting, writing plays, and working behind the scenes in Pittsburgh theater.

Haines has said that plot did not come easily at first, so she started reading mysteries to figure out how they worked. That practical bit of self-training helped point her toward crime fiction, where structure matters, tension has to build, and every loose end has a job to do.

Her first novel, The War Against Miss Winter, arrived in 2007 and introduced Rosie Winter, a struggling actress turned accidental sleuth in wartime New York. The books that followed, including The Winter of Her Discontent, Winter in June, and When Winter Returns, mix backstage life, blackouts, rationing, and murder with a heroine who is sharp, funny, and often in over her head.

Then she shifted to young adult fiction with The Girl is Murder. That novel, and its follow-up The Girl Is Trouble, follow teenage detective Iris Anderson in 1942 New York and bring the same mix of history, suspense, and plainspoken emotion to a younger narrator. The Girl is Murder was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel in 2012.

She can write dark things without losing her sense of people.

That balance shows up again in The Girl from Yesterday, a contemporary psychological thriller that leaves the World War II setting behind but keeps her interest in secrets, pressure, and the stories people tell themselves to stay afloat. Across her fiction, she returns to women who are boxed in by circumstance and keep pushing anyway, whether they are actresses, teenagers, or adults trying to outrun old damage.

Her theater work has never been a side note. Haines has been active in Pittsburgh theater since the mid-1990s, and her plays have won multiple honors at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. She has also spent many years working at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for American Music and now serves as its head.

That mix of archives, theater, and fiction feels right for her. Even when there is a corpse in the closet, her books stay interested in the working parts of a life: rent, rehearsal, family strain, wartime jobs, and the stories people tell themselves just to get through the day.