Mia P Manansala Books in Order

Mia P. Manansala was born and raised in Chicago, where she grew up in a large, multigenerational Filipino immigrant family. Her maternal grandparents' home was a busy gathering place for relatives getting settled in the United States, an experience that later helped shape the close family circles in her fiction.

She studied English at Northeastern Illinois University, then spent more than three years teaching English in South Korea. She also taught at a language school after returning to Chicago. Writing was something she had loved as a kid, but it had slipped to the side while school and work took over.

Then she decided to make room for it again.

Around 2015, Manansala signed up for a one-day mystery-writing workshop in Chicago, taught by crime writer Lori Rader-Day. In that class, she began the first novel she ever finished. The manuscript, Death Comes to Comic Con, followed a queer Filipino American woman investigating a murder at a comic convention. It did not sell, but it won recognition, led to a Pitch Wars mentorship, and helped her find an agent.

That early near miss became a useful lesson: keep writing the next thing. While the first manuscript was on submission, Manansala wrote Arsenic and Adobo. Its opening idea came to her during a train commute, and the novel became her published debut in 2021. It introduces Lila Macapagal, a young woman back in her hometown, helping at her family's Filipino restaurant and suddenly forced to investigate a murder.

The Tita Rosie's Kitchen mysteries grew from there. Homicide and Halo-Halo, Blackmail and Bibingka, Murder and Mamon, Guilt and Ginataan, and Death and Dinuguan keep Lila in Shady Palms, Illinois, where family businesses, community events, old grudges, and plenty of food can all lead to a case. Readers often come for the approachable cozy-mystery setup, then stay for the aunties, friendships, humor, and Filipino dishes woven into everyday life.

Food matters in these books because it is tied to memory, care, and family. Manansala has said that her father inspired much of the food writing, and that food was his love language. Her stories also make room for Filipino American characters to be funny, complicated, romantic, ambitious, and occasionally in serious trouble, without reducing them to one kind of story.

She also writes for younger mystery readers.

Her young adult series begins with Death in the Cards, about Chicago teen Danika Dizon, a tarot reader who wants to prove herself at her mother's detective agency. It carries Manansala's interest in community and problem-solving into a more suspenseful school-age mystery. Across her work, she returns to family ties, friendship, queer lives, pop culture, and the way a familiar neighborhood can hold both comfort and secrets.

Manansala is a Chicago-based book coach as well as a novelist. Away from the page, she has shared her fondness for baking, role-playing games, dating sims, cozy mysteries, diverse romance, and time with her dog, Gumiho. It all fits the spirit of her books: curious, warm, a little geeky, and alert to the fact that even a close-knit community can have something to hide.