Michael Craft Books in Order
Browse Michael Craft books in order, from Mark Manning and Claire Gray to Mister Puss and Dante and Jazz, with summaries, series guides, and where to start.
Last updated: July 5, 2026
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Publication Order
20 books
Rehearsing
by Michael Craft
1993
On a retreat from Broadway, director Claire Gray returns to her alma mater as a visiting professor and becomes tangled in the life of a much younger local actor. Their uneasy connection turns into a sharp story about ambition, desire, and reinvention.
Flight Dreams
by Michael Craft
1997
Reporter Mark Manning has never believed missing heiress Helena Carter is dead, even with her fortune ready to change hands. Chasing the truth pushes him into a dangerous tangle of religion, power, and his own awakening.
Eye Contact
by Michael Craft
1998
Mark takes over a story about astrophysicist Pavo Zarnik's supposed tenth planet and expects a fraud, not a corpse. When a fellow reporter is murdered and key evidence vanishes, the assignment turns into a deadly conspiracy.
Body Language
by Michael Craft
1999
Burned out in Chicago, Mark heads to Dumont, Wisconsin, to take over the local paper and reconnect with family roots. Then a cousin is killed at Christmas, and his fresh start becomes a race to uncover buried secrets.
Name Games
by Michael Craft
2000
A celebrated miniatures judge comes to Dumont for a dollhouse exhibition and winds up strangled. Mark digs into rivalries, secrets, and small-town politics while trying to help a sheriff friend who looks dangerously exposed.
Boy Toy
by Michael Craft
2001
When a teenage actor is murdered on opening night, Mark's nephew Thad quickly becomes the town's favorite suspect. Mark has to cut through gossip, theater drama, and hidden motives before the case wrecks Thad's life.
Desert Autumn
by Michael Craft
2001
Broadway director Claire Gray moves to the Palm Springs area to teach at a new arts college. In her first week, she finds a colleague's wife dead and gets pulled into a murder case while trying to rebuild her own life.
Hot Spot
by Michael Craft
2002
What should be a festive wedding weekend in Dumont turns grim when a guest dies in an apparent electrical accident. Once murder is confirmed and Mark's friend Roxanne becomes the prime suspect, the race is on to clear her.
Desert Winter
by Michael Craft
2003
Claire hopes to focus on her first college production, but a visit to an eccentric collector ends with a corpse and a missing antique clock. With her friend Grant under suspicion, she has to untangle a messy case fast.
Bitch Slap
by Michael Craft
2004
A public slap between two powerful women sets off a chain of grudges, secrets, and one fatal fall. Mark's investigation threatens not just a local merger, but the stable life he has built in Dumont with Neil.
Desert Spring
by Michael Craft
2004
Claire's talented young actor Tanner is headed for Hollywood, and producer Spencer Wallace stands in the way of their fragile romance. When Wallace turns up dead in her pool, Claire becomes a suspect in a very public murder.
Desert Summer
by Michael Craft
2005
Claire expects a quiet summer at Desert Arts College until a tense party hosted by billionaire D. Glenn Yeats goes sour. By morning his ex-wife is dead of antifreeze poisoning, and Claire is back in the middle of another elegant, poisonous mess.
The MacGuffin
by Michael Craft
2011
Fifteen years after his father's murder derailed work on a revolutionary water engine, Cooper Brant is hit by another violent death in the family. Following the link between the crimes puts him squarely in the killer's sights.
Inside Dumont
by Michael Craft
2016
Told through linked stories, this novel follows Marson Miles as Brody Norris arrives in Dumont and changes his life. The book mixes romance, humor, scandal, and small-town mystery into a wider portrait of the community.
Flabbergassed
by Michael Craft
2018
When wealthy widow Mary Questman backs a bizarre weight-loss scheme called FlabberGas, her friend Brody Norris is deeply skeptical. Then a demonstration ends in murder, and Brody gets unexpected help from a very talkative cat.
ChoirMaster
by Michael Craft
2019
A struggling church wants a dazzling new building, but money troubles, old relationships, and fresh temptation quickly muddy the waters. After someone dies, Brody and Sheriff Thomas Simms sort through the town's secrets, with Mister Puss nearby.
HomeComing
by Michael Craft
2020
Hollywood returns to Dumont when Thad Manning comes back to direct a film scene based on his youth. The excitement turns dark when someone ends up dead, sending Brody back into sleuth mode with Mister Puss at his side.
Desert Getaway
by Michael Craft
2022
Dante O'Donnell, a Palm Springs rental concierge with plenty of baggage, finds a body floating in one of his pools. To survive the fallout, he teams up with Jazz Friendly, an ex-cop turned PI who once tried to arrest him.
Desert Deadline
by Michael Craft
2023
Reclusive romance novelist Maude Movay rents one of Dante's properties to finish a huge new book deal, then leaves on a gurney. Dante and Jazz race from one murder to another while trying to protect a child and stop a killer cashing in.
Desert Reunion
by Michael Craft
2024
Dante and Jazz step in when their friend Zola Lorinsky is implicated after a death at a lavish family reunion. Then a second killing scrambles the case, and saving Zola means solving two murders instead of one.
Where should I start?
If you want a long-running reporter-sleuth series: Flight Dreams → Eye Contact → Body Language → Name Games
If you want theater, Palm Springs, and a mature amateur sleuth: Desert Autumn → Desert Winter → Desert Spring → Desert Summer
If you want cozy small-town mystery with a talking cat: Flabbergassed → ChoirMaster → HomeComing
If you want a newer odd-couple series: Desert Getaway → Desert Deadline → Desert Reunion
If you want standalones first: Rehearsing → The MacGuffin → Inside Dumont
Author bio
Michael Craft was born in 1950 in Elgin, Illinois, and grew up there in a Catholic school world that left him with discipline and a feel for language, even if not the faith itself. He later attended Elgin Academy, then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied graphic design after first starting out in architecture.
His path to fiction was not straight. In 1976 he took a job at the Chicago Tribune as an art director, helping shape the look of the paper rather than reporting for it. He spent ten years there, and the newsroom atmosphere would later feed directly into the Mark Manning books.
The train rides mattered.
After moving to Kenosha, Wisconsin, he commuted to Chicago by rail, about three hours a day with time to think, make notes, and finally begin the novel he had long wanted to write. He started serious work on fiction around 1980, kept at it through years of rejection and revision, and finally sold his debut, Rehearsing, which was published in 1993.
That patience shows up all through his career. Craft has written standalones, linked story collections, and several mystery series, but his books tend to stay close to people trying to remake their lives. His early Mark Manning novels, beginning with Flight Dreams, blend puzzle plots with a reporter's eye for institutions, secrets, and social performance. By Body Language and Name Games, the series shifts from Chicago to small-town Wisconsin and grows warmer, funnier, and more domestic without losing its edge.
He likes a strong setting.
Palm Springs and the surrounding desert became just as important to his later work as Dumont, Wisconsin. The Claire Gray books, starting with Desert Autumn, follow a seasoned theater director who leaves New York for a new life in California and keeps tripping over murder. Much later, the Dante and Jazz novels, starting with Desert Getaway, use the same broader region in a different way, with a mismatched pair of sleuths moving through vacation rentals, moneyed eccentrics, and the bright surface of resort life.
Then there is the talking cat, or maybe the not-talking cat. The Mister Puss books, including Flabbergassed and ChoirMaster, bring Craft's humor fully to the front. They are cozy in shape, but still interested in loneliness, friendship, reinvention, and the strange little bargains people make with themselves.
Craft's fiction often centers gay protagonists and queer communities, not as decoration, but as the everyday world of the story. He has said that Wisconsin helped inspire the fictional town of Dumont, and after moving to California in 2005, the desert became his newer canvas. In 2007 he earned an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, years after already building a publishing career.
His personal life has its own long arc. He met his partner Leon in 1982, later worked in Leon's family business after leaving the Tribune, and the couple married in 2013 when California law allowed it. They live in Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, which helps explain how lived-in that landscape feels on the page.
The awards came, but usually after the work. Four of Craft's novels were finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. ChoirMaster and Desert Deadline won Benjamin Franklin Awards, and Desert Getaway was nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award. Those honors tell part of the story. The fuller picture is simpler: he kept writing, kept changing, and kept finding fresh ways to turn community, desire, and trouble into smart, inviting mysteries.
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