Margaret Mizushima Books in Order

If you want the classic starting point: Killing Trail → Stalking Ground → Hunting Hour
If you like rugged outdoor mysteries: Burning Ridge → Tracking Game → Hanging Falls
If you want the bigger family-history thread: Striking Range → Standing Dead → Gathering Mist
If you prefer the newest published books: Gathering Mist → Dying Cry

Margaret Mizushima was born in Kansas and grew up on cattle ranches in Texas and Colorado. Summer meant horseback, cows, open country, and plenty of reading, sometimes from a perch in a tree with a library book. That mix of ranch life and bookishness still shows up in her fiction, which pays close attention to weather, land, animals, and the way small communities hold together under pressure.

Animals were there from the start.

In high school, she volunteered with a boy who had cerebral palsy, using lessons designed by the school speech and language therapist. The experience stayed with her and pushed her toward speech pathology. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Northern Colorado, then earned her speech pathology degree at Colorado State University.

Before she published fiction, Mizushima worked in an acute care hospital and later built her own rehabilitation agency. Her first career was rooted in the science of language and communication, but it also meant spending years with people in difficult, vulnerable moments. That human side seems to have followed her into the novels, where even secondary characters tend to feel like real people with jobs, families, and history.

Writing came later.

In 1998 she sold her company and turned serious attention to fiction. She studied craft at Colorado writing conferences, wrote through years of practice and rejection, and slowly found her lane. Mystery turned out to be the right fit. She has said she was already an avid crime fiction reader and crime documentary watcher, so once she leaned into suspense, the pieces started to click.

Her best-known work is the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, which began with Killing Trail. The books follow Deputy Mattie Cobb, her K-9 partner Robo, and veterinarian Cole Walker in a fictional Colorado mountain town. Readers often come for the cases, but stay for the dog work, the western setting, and the slow-building relationships. Titles like Hunting Hour, Standing Dead, Gathering Mist, and Dying Cry show how comfortably she moves between police procedure, family strain, and outdoor danger.

Mizushima's husband is a veterinarian, and that practical knowledge feeds directly into the series. She has said he helped her shape the idea for the Timber Creek books, and that the premise for Killing Trail grew from a conversation he had with a client. Across the series, veterinary work, animal behavior, and K-9 handling are not decorative details. They are part of the engine of the story.

What makes her books stand out is how grounded they feel. The danger can be sharp, but so are the everyday details, snowed-in roads, ranch fences, veterinary calls, the patience it takes to work with a dog, and the emotional cost of trust. She tends to return to themes of family, trauma, resilience, and the long process of making a home.

Over the years, her books have earned a Benjamin Franklin Book Award, a Colorado Authors League Award, a CIBA CLUE Award, and two Willa Literary Awards, among other honors. She also served as past president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and was named Writer of the Year by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. After more than forty years in northern Colorado, where she and her husband raised two daughters and many animals on a small ranch, the couple moved to the Pacific Northwest. They live there with their German shorthaired pointer, Bertie.