Mary Lawrence Books in Order

If you want the full Bianca Goddard story: The Alchemist's Daughter → Death of an Alchemist → Death at St. Vedast → The Alchemist of Lost Souls → The Lost Boys of London
If you want a quick sample of the series: The Alchemist's Daughter
If you prefer a standalone Tudor novel: Fool

Mary Lawrence grew up in Southern Indiana. She started college at Butler University, finished at Indiana University with a specialty degree in cytotechnology, and moved to Maine soon after, apart from a brief stretch in graduate school in western Massachusetts.

Before fiction became public, she spent more than twenty-five years working in the medical field as a cytotechnologist. She also wrote indexes for small presses and academic books, which is a very particular kind of work, patient, exacting, and built on noticing small details. That mix of science and language shows up all through her novels.

Writing grew alongside all that lab work, not instead of it. Lawrence has said she always loved a well-told story, and a book about alchemy pushed her toward the idea that would eventually shape her career: a daughter of an alchemist trying to survive in the last years of Henry VIII.

The first version of that story was a coming-of-age novel, not a mystery. An agent signed her, but the manuscript never sold, even after repeated rewrites. So she kept going, wrote other manuscripts, and slowly got better. In 2010 she was a Golden Heart finalist and also placed in a national young adult writing contest. After a few more near misses, she decided to turn the alchemy book into a mystery, mostly as a challenge to herself.

She kept at it.

That gamble paid off with The Alchemist's Daughter in 2015. The book introduced Bianca Goddard, a healer living among the poor of Southwark, and it was named a Best Historical Mystery of 2015 by Suspense Magazine. Readers who click with Lawrence usually like the same things: gritty Tudor streets, practical medicine, uneasy family ties, and murder cases solved through observation more than swagger. They are historical mysteries, but they are also books about work, hunger, disease, and what ordinary people owe each other.

She stayed with Bianca through Death of an Alchemist, Death at St. Vedast, The Alchemist of Lost Souls, and The Lost Boys of London. Those books care as much about commoners, apprentices, dockworkers, widows, and children as they do about kings and policy, which gives the setting a grounded feel. Lawrence's science background matters here too. Her fiction keeps returning to herbs, illness, bodies, remedies, and the thin line between cure and poison.

She knows how bodies fail, and she writes that world plainly.

Outside the Bianca books, Lawrence has written articles that appeared in publications including The Daily Beast. In 2026 she published Fool, a standalone Tudor novel about Kronos, a court fool pulled into dangerous politics around Katherine Howard. It shifts the action closer to the royal court, but it still fits her long interest in people who survive by wit, nerve, and close attention. These days Lawrence lives in Maine, runs a berry farm with her husband, reads widely in Tudor fiction, historical mysteries, and nonfiction, and says she drinks way too much coffee. She has also said that environmental and political issues matter a great deal to her.