Lorraine Highsmith Mysteries Books in Order

The Lorraine Highsmith books take Erica Ruth Neubauer in a very different direction. Instead of 1920s hotels and globe-trotting suspense, this series lands in late 1980s Wisconsin, where the weather is sharp, the gossip moves fast, and danger shows up on an ordinary front lawn. It starts with Two Bodies Are Better Than One, when Lorraine Highsmith wakes up to find a private investigator dead outside her home in Sheboygan Bay.

Lorraine is not a standard amateur sleuth. She is a septuagenarian advice columnist, sharp-tongued, stubborn, and much harder to read than the people around her realize. Before she settled in Wisconsin, she had ties to the Chicago mob, and that buried history gives the series its central tension. Lorraine wants the truth about the corpse on her lawn, but she also needs to know whether the murder is random small-town violence or a message from a past she has not fully escaped.

Across from her is Detective Michaela Zenoni, usually called Mike, a newly promoted detective trying to prove herself in a male-dominated police department. Mike brings the official investigation. Lorraine brings gossip, instinct, and a habit of barging into places she probably should not be. Their connection is uneasy from the start, which is exactly why it works. They need each other, but neither is eager to admit it.

Neither woman is especially good at backing down.

That setup gives the series a useful blend of amateur sleuth energy and police procedural structure. Lorraine's newspaper ties mean she is always sniffing around for a scoop, while Mike is trying to solve the case the right way, or at least the defensible way. Sheboygan Bay matters as more than a backdrop too. It is small enough for every rumor to count, but large enough to hide grudges, bad history, and people who have gotten comfortable being underestimated.

Sheboygan Bay looks quiet until it doesn't.

If the Jane Wunderly books are built around motion, Lorraine Highsmith is built around collision. Lorraine's hidden past keeps smashing into the present, and Mike's effort to solve a murder keeps tangling with Lorraine's effort to survive one. Dead Men Can't Deadlift continues the series. If you like dark humor, a strong sense of place, and mysteries where a supposedly harmless older woman is often the most dangerous person in the room, this is the Neubauer series to try when you want something more contemporary and a little more sardonic.