Lissa Marie Redmond Books in Order

For Lauren Riley from the beginning: A Cold Day in Hell → The Murder Book → A Means to an End → A Full Cold Moon.
For a snowed-in whodunit: Catch Your Death.
For an international case: A Full Cold Moon → The Parting Glass.
For a standalone undercover mystery: The Secrets They Left Behind.

Lissa Marie Redmond was born and raised in Western New York, the part of the state that shows up in her fiction with lake-effect weather, local pride, and a practical sense of humor. Before she was writing murder cases for readers, she was working real ones. Redmond spent more than two decades in law enforcement and retired as a cold case homicide detective with the Buffalo Police Department.

The writing part started early.

As a kid, she loved reading and wanted a typewriter for Christmas, which says a lot about the direction her brain was already facing. The books came much later, but the habit was there first: pay attention, imagine the missing pieces, and get the story down. After 22 years on the force, including time in the Special Victims Unit and the Cold Case Homicide Squad, she retired in 2015 and moved into crime fiction.

Quiet is relative.

Redmond's first novel, A Cold Day in Hell, arrived in 2018 and introduced Detective Lauren Riley, a Buffalo cold case investigator with a private investigator license and a complicated relationship with the legal system. Lauren is good at the job, but Redmond doesn't write her as a magic answer machine. The appeal is in the procedure: witness statements, old evidence, office politics, bad memories, and the slow pressure of doubt.

The Cold Case Investigation series keeps building that world. The Murder Book puts Lauren in danger inside her own department after an attack tied to active case files. A Means to an End brings back David Spencer, a suspect Lauren once helped clear and now cannot stop watching. A Full Cold Moon sends a Buffalo murder case toward Iceland, while The Parting Glass takes Lauren to rural Ireland for an art-theft investigation that refuses to stay tidy. Catch Your Death pulls the series into a snowed-in reunion, where Lauren's partner Shane Reese has more history with the old case than he first admits.

Redmond has also written outside the Lauren Riley books. The Secrets They Left Behind follows Shea O'Connor, a young Buffalo police officer sent undercover after three college freshmen vanish from a small town during Christmas break. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and mystery publications, and her story work has earned a Derringer Award nomination.

What ties the books together is Redmond's interest in the cost of unfinished business. Her detectives deal with victims' families who have waited too long, suspects who know how to perform innocence, and departments where loyalty can help or hurt, depending on who is asking for it. Buffalo and Western New York aren't just scenery. They shape the cases, the weather, the neighborhoods, and the stubbornness of the people moving through them.

Redmond still lives and writes in Western New York with her family. She has also described life with a pampered puppy and an ungrateful cat, which feels right for someone who writes about control and then has pets. That's about as normal as a crime writer's life gets.