Maria DiRico Books in Order

If you want the series from the start: Here Comes the Body → Long Island Iced Tina
If you want to continue in order: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder → Four Parties and a Funeral → The Witless Protection Program
If you like holiday and family drama: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder → The Witless Protection Program
If you want Belle View at its busiest: Long Island Iced Tina → Four Parties and a Funeral

Maria DiRico is the pen name of Ellen Byron, a Queens-born writer whose fiction keeps circling back to food, family, and neighborhoods that feel fully lived in. Her books may solve murders, but they never lose sight of the people doing the living.

She was born in Queens, raised in Queens and Westchester County, and grew up around the Italian-American side of her mother's family. Those relatives ran catering halls in Queens, and that world later became the backbone of Mia Carina's Astoria mysteries.

Family lore mattered too. On her father's side, Byron's grandfather was a low-level Jewish mobster who disappeared in 1933, the sort of family story a mystery writer does not forget. That mix of old New York history and family chaos runs straight through the Catering Hall books.

Writing was not a straight line at first. At Tulane University, a theater professor encouraged her to take it seriously. Byron was trying to act, got tired of waiting to be cast, and wrote a play instead. That led to more playwriting, then freelance journalism, and eventually a move to Los Angeles, where she chased television work with the stubbornness of a born New Yorker.

Then TV took over.

In Los Angeles, she built a long career as a writer and producer for comedy, with credits that include Wings, Just Shoot Me, and The Fairly OddParents. She also wrote more than 200 magazine articles and, in one of her favorite resume lines, worked as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart. All of that shows up in the books as sharp dialogue, brisk scenes, and a good eye for workplace absurdity.

Mysteries came later, during a dry patch in TV work and after some plain old script burnout. Byron joined a small writers group, tried again at the kind of stories she loved to read, and won the William F. Deeck grant from Malice Domestic for an unpublished manuscript. That first manuscript did not sell, but the next one became Plantation Shudders, the novel that launched her crime fiction career for real.

Louisiana stayed with her.

Even though she is a native New Yorker, Byron fell hard for New Orleans and Louisiana, and that affection became the basis for the Cajun Country mysteries. In Plantation Shudders, Maggie Crozat returns home to help save her family's B&B in Pelican. In Bayou Book Thief, Ricki James-Diaz starts over in New Orleans and winds up running a vintage cookbook shop inside a culinary house museum.

Byron likes heroines who are rebuilding. Mia Carina goes back to Astoria after a disastrous marriage in Here Comes the Body. Dee Stern, the lead of A Very Woodsy Murder, leaves behind television and buys a rustic motel in California Gold Rush country. Readers usually come for the murders, but stay for the family arguments, local history, food, and the everyday pressure of keeping a small business alive when everything, including the guest list, is going sideways.

That mix has earned Byron Agatha and Lefty awards, but the better clue to her work is the way each series feels inhabited. She now writes full time from the Los Angeles area, where she lives with her husband, daughter, and rescue dogs, while keeping one foot on the page in New York and another in Louisiana.