Pen & Ink Mysteries Books in Order

The Pen and Ink Mysteries take place in Georgetown, Washington DC, where Florrie Fox manages the Color Me Read bookstore by day and designs intricate adult coloring books at night. The first novel, Color Me Murder, finds her sketching in the margins of life, then pulled into a homicide when a body turns up inside the bookshop itself.

Florrie is a grounded, practical narrator. She bikes through the neighborhood, notices architectural details and shop windows, and treats her art as both creative outlet and extra job. When her professor boss, John Maxwell, offers her a rent free carriage house on his property in exchange for keeping more grasping relatives away, she suddenly has both a dream apartment and a front row view of family tensions.

Color Me Read serves as the series hub. The store hosts author events, coloring clubs, and community gatherings that give Krista Davis plenty of excuses for people with clashing personalities to rub shoulders. Customers range from retirees and students to eccentric collectors and social media influencers, and any of them might have a motive when something goes wrong.

Each book plays with a slightly different hook. A rare eighteenth century coloring book surfaces and then vanishes after its owner is killed. A Halloween reading with a theatrical psychic leads to a missing person case and a very real corpse that appears to have been rolled up and spirited away. A society wedding at Maxwell’s family estate turns deadly when one of the guests is murdered in the middle of the celebration.

Florrie’s artist’s eye gives the stories a distinctive flavor. She notices patterns in the way clues repeat, keeps visual notes in sketches and coloring pages, and thinks in terms of palettes and design as she pieces timelines together. Her relationship with Sergeant Eric Jonquille, the policeman who keeps getting assigned to her cases, adds a low key romantic thread without overwhelming the mysteries.

A playful bonus is that the covers of the Pen and Ink books are designed to be colored by readers, mirroring Florrie’s own work. That interactive touch fits the series as a whole. These are bookstore based cozies that invite you to settle in with pencils or markers, follow along as Florrie connects the dots, and then literally fill in the lines yourself.