Sherry Harris Books in Order

If you want to begin with Sarah's fresh start: Tagged for Death → The Longest Yard Sale → All Murders Final!
If you like antiques, estates, and rare book mysteries: A Good Day to Buy → The Gun Also Rises → Absence of Alice
If you want the Florida beach-bar series: From Beer to Eternity → A Time to Swill → Three Shots to the Wind
If you want later Sarah Winston highlights: Let's Fake a Deal → Sell Low, Sweet Harriet → Absence of Alice

Sherry Harris writes cozy mysteries that feel grounded in real places and everyday routines. Her books are full of garage sale finds, small-town politics, beach bars, and women who keep going when life gets messy. She is a two-time Agatha Award nominated author, best known for the Sarah Winston Garage Sale mysteries and the Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon books.

Stories were there early. As a child, Harris loved the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace and has said they were a big reason she wanted to write. She also started bargain hunting in second grade at a friend's yard sale, which sounds like a small childhood memory until you realize it later became part of her fiction.

Before publication, Harris worked as the director of marketing for a financial planning company in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Writing ads, newsletters, and newspaper copy taught her to be brief and clear. Later, after she married an Air Force officer and moved often, a steady traditional career became harder to keep, and fiction became the work she could carry with her from place to place.

She kept at it.

Harris has talked openly about the years before her first book, years that included finished manuscripts and plenty of rejection letters. The break came when a garage sale themed mystery project came her way, and she was ready for it. She pulled together three things she knew well, bargain hunting, military life, and the years she and her family spent near Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and turned them into Tagged for Death.

That debut introduced Sarah Winston, a newly divorced former military spouse building a business out of garage sales in small-town Massachusetts. Books like The Longest Yard Sale, All Murders Final!, and The Gun Also Rises kept the series moving with smart clues, humor, and a lot of affection for people who know how to make do. Readers tend to like the balance of community, practical detail, and the plain pleasure of watching Sarah spot value where other people see junk.

Then she headed south.

From Beer to Eternity launched her Florida series and traded New England thrift shops for the Sea Glass Saloon in the Panhandle town of Emerald Cove. Chloe Jackson, a former Chicago librarian, arrives to help her late friend's grandmother and soon finds herself untangling murders in a place that looks relaxed from the outside but is full of secrets. In A Time to Swill and Three Shots to the Wind, Harris keeps the mysteries tight while letting the beach-town setting, shifting loyalties, and found-family feeling do a lot of the work.

Across both series, Harris returns to people who are rebuilding. Her heroines are practical women with jobs, bills, and messy histories, not amateur sleuths looking for excitement. They notice things, they care about people, and they keep asking questions when it would be safer to stop.

Outside the novels, Harris has served as president of Sisters in Crime and is a member of Mystery Writers of America. She works as an independent editor, has published short fiction, and is also a patent-holding inventor. She and her husband have been living in northern Virginia with their guard dog, Lily, while deciding where to move next. It fits that her own life, like her books, has plenty of motion in it.