Rett MacPherson Books in Order

If you want the Torie O'Shea series from the beginning: Family Skeletons → A Veiled Antiquity → A Comedy of Heirs
If you want peak cozy genealogy mysteries: Killing Cousins → Blood Relations → In Sheep's Clothing
If you want the later New Kassel books: Dead Man Running → Died in the Wool → The Blood Ballad → Bad to the Bones
If you want a standalone historical mystery: Sleeping the Churchyard Sleep
If you want a lighter standalone with romance: Strange Bedfellows

Rett MacPherson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and her fiction has always felt close to home. She writes mysteries full of small-town history, family stories, cemeteries, old papers, and the stubborn way the past keeps showing up when people would rather leave it alone.

Genealogy is the engine under the hood.

Her best-known work is the Torie O'Shea series, which began with Family Skeletons in 1997. That first book introduced Victory, better known as Torie, a Missouri genealogist whose research into other people's roots keeps leading her straight into trouble. Over the books that followed, including A Veiled Antiquity, Killing Cousins, Dead Man Running, and The Blood Ballad, MacPherson built a mystery world where courthouse records, old diaries, cemetery plots, river lore, and local gossip matter just as much as fingerprints.

That blend helped define the genealogical mystery, a corner of the cozy field that MacPherson is often credited with helping pioneer. Readers come for the puzzle, but they also stay for Torie's family life, quick humor, and the way each case grows naturally out of local history instead of feeling dropped in from somewhere else.

She has a soft spot for the things most people walk past.

MacPherson has worked as a customer service representative at a St. Louis book wholesaler, which feels like fitting background for someone who ended up building a writing life around books. Working close to the book trade meant living near readers, backlist titles, and the everyday business of getting stories into people's hands. She has also described herself as a bead and fabric artist, and that eye for texture shows up all through her fiction, from quilts and heirlooms to the cluttered beauty of old houses.

Her interests outside writing are unusually on-brand. She has said she loves genealogy, history, cemeteries, wineries, and all kinds of fabric, lace, buttons, and beads. She has also joked that if time travel were possible, she would use it to visit her own ancestors. That mix of curiosity and humor fits her books perfectly.

Her standalone fiction shows another side of her work. Sleeping the Churchyard Sleep, published in 2014, was loosely based on her mother's childhood in rural West Virginia after contracting polio at age ten, then turned into its own mystery story. Later she published Strange Bedfellows, a lighter, more romantic novel about a woman using DNA kits to search for her father and finding more than she expected in Minnesota.

Her writing process sounds just as practical as her plots. She has said she does not spend much time waiting around for inspiration. When the words are not coming, she reads, writes anyway, and keeps the habit alive. That no-nonsense streak runs through her fiction too. Even when the stories reach into buried scandals and old graves, they stay grounded in ordinary work, family ties, and the very human need to know where we come from.

MacPherson has long lived in the St. Louis area. She has also shared that she likes being outdoors, practices yoga, enjoys British television, and reads heavily. All of that feels of a piece with the books: curious, funny, a little history-minded, and always ready to follow one more trail into the past.