Sir Charles Sheridan Books in Order

If you want the true starting point: Death at Bishop's Keep → Death at Gallows Green → Death at Daisy's Folly
If you want the Kate and Charles arc: Death at Bishop's Keep → Death at Gallows Green → Death at Daisy's Folly → Death at Devil's Bridge
If you like science and early forensics: Death at Devil's Bridge → Death at Dartmoor → Death on the Lizard
If you want bigger political intrigue: Death at Whitechapel → Death at Glamis Castle → Death in Hyde Park

Susan Wittig Albert was born in Vermilion County, Illinois, and grew up in downstate Illinois, around Danville and Bismarck. Before she was a novelist, she was a serious student of literature, earning an English degree from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She later taught English, worked in university administration, and eventually served as vice president for academic affairs at Southwest Texas State University.

Writing started as something she did alongside that academic life. In the mid-1980s, worn out by university politics and wanting a life that felt more her own, she stepped away from administration and turned to fiction full time. It was a big shift, but it stuck.

She did not stay in one lane.

Early on, Albert wrote young adult books and also worked under the Carolyn Keene house name on Nancy Drew titles. That experience seems to have sharpened two of her lasting strengths: clean storytelling and respect for series readers. She understands how to build a world readers want to revisit.

For many people, the door into her work is Thyme of Death, the first China Bayles mystery. China is a former Houston lawyer who opens an herb shop in a small Texas town, and the books mix murder with herbs, cooking, friendship, and Hill Country life. Thyme of Death was nominated for both an Agatha and an Anthony Award, and the series grew into Albert's best-known long-running project.

But China Bayles is only one corner of the map. The Darling Dahlias books move to 1930s Alabama, where a garden club faces Depression-era problems with wit and stubbornness. In The Tale of Hill Top Farm and the later Cottage Tales, Albert turns to Beatrix Potter's England and finds room for village mysteries, animal charm, and the quiet labor of making a home.

Her historical novels show another side of her interests. Books like A Wilder Rose, Loving Eleanor, and The General's Women look closely at women whose lives were partly hidden by public history. Readers who like those books often respond to the same thing that powers her mysteries: solid research, emotional clarity, and a strong feeling for place.

The Sir Charles Sheridan books came from a close collaboration with her husband, Bill Albert. Writing together as Robin Paige, the two created a dozen Victorian and Edwardian mysteries built around Kate Ardleigh Sheridan and Sir Charles Sheridan. Bill's love of British history, archaeology, photography, travel, and hands-on research helped shape that series, and he has said that Charles was his alter ego. Their partnership gave those books a slightly broader, more adventurous scale.

Place matters.

Whether Albert is writing about the Texas Hill Country, a small Alabama town, or rural England, she notices gardens, kitchens, weather, work, and the small rules that hold a community together. Her fiction returns again and again to capable women, local knowledge, and the ways history presses on ordinary life. Even when the mystery is sharp, the world around it feels lived in and humane.

She has lived for many years in the Texas Hill Country with Bill, and that landscape runs through both her fiction and her memoirs. She also founded the Story Circle Network, a long-running community for women's life writing. That mix of curiosity, discipline, and everyday texture helps explain why readers stay with her. The books feel informed without feeling stiff, and generous without ever losing their momentum.