Rosie Genova Books in Order

If you want the cozy Jersey Shore mysteries: Murder and Marinara → The Wedding Soup Murder → A Dish Best Served Cold
If you want the full Italian Kitchen run: Murder and Marinara → The Wedding Soup Murder → A Dish Best Served Cold → Minestrone Mischief → The Seven-Course Christmas Killer
If you want time travel with a historical mystery: Murder on the Steel Pier
If you want darker standalone suspense: Seeing Things

Rosie Genova is a New Jersey writer whose fiction keeps circling back to the shore, to family tables, and to the kind of trouble that arrives just as dinner is being served. She writes across cozy mystery, suspense, and time travel, but place is always a big part of the draw. Her books are full of boardwalk towns, old family ties, and the push and pull between leaving home and getting pulled back.

New Jersey is never just scenery in her work.

Before fiction took over, she spent years teaching and working in journalism. That mix shows up on the page. She has a teacher's sense of structure, a reporter's eye for detail, and a habit of asking one more question when a story seems settled. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including Entrepreneur and The New York Times.

Writing started early for her. In an essay about her path, she said she was writing poems at eight, joined school literary magazines as a teenager, and published her first article at thirty. Later, after finishing a novel and trying to figure out what came next, she cracked open a fortune cookie that told her she would write a book. She kept that slip of paper for years, and it became a funny but stubborn reminder to keep going.

She did keep going.

That persistence led to Murder and Marinara, the 2013 opener to the Italian Kitchen Mysteries. The series follows mystery writer Victoria Rienzi as she returns to the Jersey Shore and gets tangled up in murders around her family's restaurant, the Casa Lido. Readers who like these books usually come for the cozy puzzles, the Italian food, and the family banter, then stay for the beach-town atmosphere. The Wedding Soup Murder, A Dish Best Served Cold, and later Minestrone Mischief build on that same mix of crime, comedy, and homecoming.

Genova has also widened the frame. Murder on the Steel Pier sends reporter Tess Mancini into 1955 Atlantic City, where time travel, family history, and a murder charge collide. Seeing Things moves in a darker direction, following a boardwalk fortune-teller whose unsettling visions pull her into a suspicious death. Even when the tone shifts, she keeps returning to ordinary women in recognizable Jersey places, trying to make sense of danger that lands too close to home. She has also written and published work under her own name, Rosemary DiBattista.

Her career has had a few turns of its own. The Italian Kitchen books were first published by Penguin Random House, then later returned to her, and she reissued them through her own imprint, Two Roses Books. In essays and author profiles, she comes across as practical about the business side of writing, but still very attached to the work itself and the long game of making books.

These days she still lives in New Jersey. She is the mother of three sons and lives with her husband, a dog named Lucy, and, by her own account, too many dusty antiques. That sounds about right for a writer whose stories balance warmth, history, and a little bit of mischief.