Rebecca M Hale Books in Order

If you want the main cat mysteries: How to Wash a Cat → Nine Lives Last Forever → How to Moon a Cat
If you want the full San Francisco treasure arc: How to Wash a Cat → How to Tail a Cat → How to Paint a Cat → How to Catch a Cat
If you want island suspense: Adrift on St. John → Afoot on St. Croix → Aground on St. Thomas
If you want a shorter Caribbean read: Ode to a Fish Sandwich → Our Island Inn → Death of a Day-Tripper

Rebecca M. Hale writes mysteries that like to settle into a place and stay there for a while. Her books move through San Francisco antique shops, city landmarks, and Caribbean islands, and they usually bring along a few odd clues, a dash of local history, and more than one cat. She is best known for the Cats and Curios novels and the Mystery in the Islands books, and she lives in Western Colorado.

Public biographical details on Hale are fairly spare, but the path into writing is still clear enough to trace. She studied at Colorado State University, went on to Vanderbilt University School of Law, and then worked for several years as a patent attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. That legal career put her in the middle of one of the cities that would later become central to her fiction.

Then she changed course.

Her first novel, How to Wash a Cat, introduced readers to the Green Vase antique shop, Oscar's niece, and the scene-stealing cats Rupert and Isabella. A deceased uncle and a surprising inheritance are classic cozy ingredients, but Hale used them to open a larger treasure hunt tied to old San Francisco secrets. It also established the blend that would become her signature: mystery, humor, strong sense of place, and a real interest in the stories hidden under a city's surface. Hale's debut went on to make the bestseller lists, which gave her room to keep building the strange little world she had opened up.

The Cats and Curios books that followed, including Nine Lives Last Forever, How to Moon a Cat, How to Tail a Cat, How to Paint a Cat, and How to Catch a Cat, keep expanding that setup. Readers who stick with the series usually do it for the same reasons. The cats are funny without turning into cartoons. The antique shop is a great home base. And the long-running puzzle around Uncle Oscar lets Hale mix hidden money, old grudges, San Francisco lore, and genuinely odd clues into one continuing thread. San Francisco itself keeps stepping forward, especially its Gold Rush past and civic oddities.

Place matters a lot in her work.

You can see that just as clearly in the Mystery in the Islands novels. In Adrift on St. John, Afoot on St. Croix, and Aground on St. Thomas, Hale shifts from cat-centered cozy mystery toward broader island suspense. The U.S. Virgin Islands are not just pretty backdrops in these books. She uses local legend, political tension, old history, and the uneasiness between tourists and residents to give the mysteries more weight and a different kind of atmosphere.

She also wrote the shorter Quirky Tales from the Caribbean, including Ode to a Fish Sandwich, which shows the same interest in island life on a smaller scale. Even when the books are compact, Hale tends to focus on people who arrive carrying baggage, emotional or literal, and discover they have stepped into places with longer memories than they expected. She likes communities where rumor, history, and daily life all sit close together. The tone can slide from funny to tense in a hurry, which suits her well.

Research seems to be part of how she works. Hale has said that she travels for book research, especially to San Francisco and the Caribbean, and that feels right when you read her fiction. The books are full of murals, waterfronts, ferries, old buildings, island roads, and bits of local lore that give them texture. She writes like someone who wants the setting to do as much work as the plot.

These days the outline is simple. Rebecca M. Hale writes from Western Colorado, with Rupert and Isabella named as her feline writing associates, and keeps turning toward mysteries built from place, history, and human eccentricity. She is not an author who floods the public record with personal anecdotes, so the books do a lot of the talking. If that combination sounds like your kind of reading, her shelves are easy to map and fun to explore.