Maia Chance Books in Order

If you want fairy tale mysteries: Snow White Red-Handed → Cinderella Six Feet Under → Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna → Sleeping Beauty, Borrowed Time
If you want witty Prohibition capers: Come Hell or Highball → Teetotaled → Gin and Panic → Naughty on Ice
If you want cozy small town sleuthing: Bad Housekeeping → Bad Neighbors
If you want darker modern suspense: The Body Next Door → The Ravine
If you want a retro standalone mystery: The Trophy Wives of Alpenrose

Maia Chance was born in Colville, Washington, and grew up in Moscow, Idaho. Long before she was publishing mysteries and thrillers, music was at the center of her life. She studied violin performance at the Eastman School of Music, then earned a master's degree in violin performance from the Longy School of Music.

For a time, she worked as an orchestral musician in the Boston area. Then she headed back to the Northwest and took a very different path, earning a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington. Somewhere between practice rooms, graduate seminars, and deep reading in nineteenth century literature, fiction took hold.

She did not arrive at writing by a straight line.

That mixed background helps explain why her books often feel both playful and carefully built. Her early mysteries are steeped in period atmosphere, old stories, and women who have to think fast. Snow White Red-Handed introduces Ophelia Flax, a Victorian actress who talks her way into trouble and then has to talk, bluff, and investigate her way back out. In Cinderella Six Feet Under and Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna, Chance keeps working in that rich corner where fairy tale imagery, old houses, and real human greed all collide.

She also has a sharp comic streak. The Discreet Retrieval Agency novels, beginning with Come Hell or Highball, shift to Prohibition era New York and follow broke widow Lola Woodby and her Swedish cook, Berta, as they try to keep a tiny detective business alive. Teetotaled, Gin and Panic, and Naughty on Ice lean into banter, caper energy, and the fun of watching two clever women muddle through bad plans, worse clients, and the occasional murder.

Then she took another turn.

With Bad Housekeeping, she introduced Agnes Blythe and Great Aunt Effie, an aunt and niece trying to rescue a shabby old inn in small town New York while murders keep getting in the way. That series keeps the humor, but it also shows her fondness for homecoming stories, family friction, and buildings that are a little worse for wear. One thing that pops up again and again in her work is a fascination with houses and what they hold, castles, inns, mansions, vacation homes, and the secrets tucked inside them.

Her later books move more fully into suspense. The Body Next Door was her first thriller, and it brought a darker, more modern edge to themes she had already been circling for years, hidden histories, uneasy marriages, and places that look beautiful right up until they stop feeling safe. The Ravine continues in that vein, with domestic strain, isolation, and a setting that seems to be watching the characters as closely as they watch each other.

Across her bibliography, Chance tends to come back to underestimated women, strange communities, and the thin line between the comforting and the unsettling. She has published nine mystery novels and three short stories, and one of her mysteries was anthologized in Reader's Digest Fiction Favorites. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, two children, and a dog, and by her own account she loves baking, reading, walking that dog, and quietly gawking at other people's houses.