Maddie Richards Mystery Books in Order

The Maddie Richards books follow a homicide sergeant trying to keep both her city and her home life from spinning out of control. Maddie works for the Phoenix Police Department, where her clearance rate makes her one of the most effective detectives on the force. At the same time she is a divorced mother, a daughter and a woman who is still figuring out what she wants outside of work.

The Beholder throws her straight into a nightmare. A serial killer is targeting beautiful women, and the press has given the murderer a chilling nickname. Maddie’s chief frames the assignment as a career maker or breaker, then stands back to see how she performs. As she closes in on the pattern behind the killings, she has to navigate sexual harassment inside the department, an ex husband seeking full custody of their son and two very different men who could become something more than friends.

In Death of a Bankster, Maddie starts with what appears to be a straightforward murder. A woman claims that her banker husband was shot, but Maddie soon discovers that the victim’s wife filed for divorce the day before the killing. The more she learns, the clearer it becomes that money, power and marital resentment are tangled together. Ryan Testler, familiar to readers of the Linda Darby series, steps into Maddie’s world here, bringing his own brand of off the books justice and creating a slow burn tension between their approaches.

The Twists & Turns of Matrimony and Murder takes the series’ interest in relationships to an extreme. Centered on the marriage of Constance and Frank Merriweather, it starts as a portrait of two people who walked into a wedding with very different expectations. When a murder upends that fragile balance, the question is not only who pulled the trigger but which partner was actually meant to die. The result feels part domestic comedy, part whodunit.

Across the Maddie Richards books, Bishop balances the carefully plotted mechanics of homicide investigations with the messier business of family, romance and ambition. Maddie’s cases force her to confront greed, betrayal and violence, but the stories never lose sight of the son she is raising, the mother who shares her home and the colleagues who may or may not have her back. It is a series for readers who like procedural detail delivered through a lead detective who refuses to be reduced to her badge.