Suzanne Young Books in Order

If you want to start with Edna Davies from the beginning: Murder by Yew → Murder by Proxy → Murder by Mishap → Murder by Christmas.
If you like small-town cozies with family drama: Murder by Christmas → Murder by Arrangement → Murder by Decay.
If you prefer Edna's later, tenser investigations: Murder by Arrangement → Murder by Decay → Murder by Stealth.
If you want a Colorado-based standalone with new sleuths: The Wrong Coat.

Suzanne Young grew up in Rhode Island and built a second life in Colorado, trading a long career in technology for crime fiction about determined women, small towns, and the trouble that hides in everyday routines.

She was born in Providence and raised in nearby communities as the fourth of five children, often brushed off as the pesky kid sister. Being left to her own devices meant hours alone with books, and she developed an early fascination with words and how they worked.

Weekends and school holidays often meant driving out to a family farm near Hope Valley, where the main house, a former stagecoach stop, creaked and groaned in every season. She read under an apple tree, explored the drafty attic and cold cellar, and escaped to the beaches at Narragansett or to fish markets in Wickford and Galilee, watching lobsters and shellfish in their tanks.

At home, both parents were serious readers, and the house was lined with shelves. By the time she headed to the University of Rhode Island to study English, she was as interested in the shape of a sentence as in the mystery or romance it carried.

After graduation she loaded her belongings into a small VW Karmann Ghia, set off across the country with less than a hundred dollars, and eventually landed in Boulder, Colorado, where she found work helping a higher-education consortium turn complex reports into clear, readable prose.

A later stop in Boston and Cambridge brought her to a research project at MIT that was studying the early computerization of urban emergency services. The work mixed editing, technical writing, and data, and it sparked a lasting curiosity about public safety, police work, and how big systems touch individual lives, interests that would quietly filter into her fiction.

Back in Colorado she shifted further into technology, building a career as a writer, editor, computer programmer, and business analyst. In her thirties she discovered Agatha Christie, fell hard for the cozy mystery form, took short-story classes, and joined critique groups and organizations like Denver Woman's Press Club, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Sisters in Crime, and the Arvada Citizens Police Academy, all while dreaming up puzzles of her own.

In 2010 she retired from software development and turned to storytelling full time, launching the Edna Davies mysteries with Murder by Yew, where an amateur herbalist and grandmother in a small Rhode Island town is blamed for a poisoning in her own garden. Later novels such as Murder by Proxy, Murder by Mishap, Murder by Christmas, Murder by Arrangement, Murder by Decay, and Murder by Stealth keep Edna juggling family, friendship, and danger as she follows trails that run from coastal villages to Colorado mountain towns.

Young also created Beryl Fishen and Nadine Rodd, two widows in a Colorado retirement community who stumble into crime in The Wrong Coat, and together these series showcase the things she cares about most on the page: older women who refuse to be sidelined, close-knit communities with long memories, and mysteries built from ordinary moments that suddenly tip into peril. She continues to live in Colorado, stay active in local writing circles, and support community groups ranging from food banks to guide-dog and animal-rescue organizations, all while dreaming up new ways for her characters to get into trouble and find their way back out.