Libby Klein Books in Order

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, New Jersey, a place that later became the home turf of her Poppy McAllister mysteries. She attended Lower Cape May Regional High School in the 1980s, where her classes included culinary science and drama. It is an unusually useful combination for a writer whose books make room for both food and a little theatrical chaos.

Cape May gives Klein a strong starting point. Its shore-town rhythm, historic houses, restaurants, visitors, and locals with long memories all feed into the setting of her early mysteries. Her stories tend to begin with familiar problems, such as family friction, money worries, old relationships, or a business that needs saving, before a murder turns everything upside down.

A health change also shaped the practical side of her work. After an autoimmune diagnosis, Klein removed gluten from her kitchen and adopted a Paleo diet. That experience gives the gluten-free baking and food restrictions in her fiction an everyday feel, rather than making them seem like a passing gimmick.

Her mystery-writing career began publicly in 2018 with Class Reunions Are Murder. The book introduces Poppy McAllister, a newly widowed woman who returns to Cape May for her high-school reunion and quickly finds herself caught up in a murder investigation. Poppy is funny, anxious, stubborn, and trying to rebuild a life that did not go as planned.

The Poppy series continued with books including Midnight Snacks are Murder, Restaurant Weeks Are Murder, Theater Nights Are Murder, and Wine Tastings Are Murder. Across the series, Poppy runs a B&B with her eccentric Aunt Ginny, bakes gluten-free treats, and keeps encountering crimes in places that ought to be harmless fun. A culinary competition, a local theater production, a winery, and an antiques auction all become possible crime scenes.

Food is part of the evidence.

Klein later introduced a different kind of amateur sleuth in Vice and Virtue. Layla Virtue is a recovering alcoholic and former police officer who is trying to support herself as a musician while living in a Potomac County trailer park. When a death at one of her gigs turns suspicious, Layla’s old investigative instincts return, whether she wants them to or not.

Gimme Shelter continues Layla’s story as she balances a murder investigation, her complicated relationship with her famous rocker father, and the painful questions left by the police operation that ended her career. These books still have Klein’s humor, but they also spend more time with recovery, trust, memory, and the people who show up when someone is trying to start over.

Klein is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She writes from Northern Virginia, where she lives with a black Lab named Vader and a Persian cat named Miss Eliza Doolittle. Coffee, gluten-free baking, fluffy cats, travel, and sarcasm are all part of the picture.

Her mysteries make room for bad decisions, good friends, and one more question before the case is closed.