Tessa Wegert Books in Order

If you want to start at book one: Death in the Family → The Dead Season → Dead Wind
If you want the later, more personal Shana cases: The Kind to Kill → Devils at the Door → The Coldest Case
If you want the iciest, most isolated case: The Coldest Case
If you want to try her newer series: In the Bones

Tessa Wegert grew up in Quebec, near the Vermont border, in a house full of books. She later studied Communication Studies at Concordia University and built a long career in journalism, digital marketing, and copywriting. That background gave her a useful mix of habits, quick research, close revision, and a feel for pacing that still shows in her fiction.

For a long time, fiction was something she fit in around the edges. She wrote short stories when she was young, kept at it as an adult, and eventually won the crime category in the Writer's Digest Popular Fiction Awards for her story Moms' Night Out.

The jump to novels came later.

Wegert has said that when her children were very young, she wanted a creative outlet and a project that was fully her own. She wrote a speculative thriller, and while that first manuscript did not sell, it got her an agent and convinced her she could handle the long form. She kept going through several practice novels before landing on the kind of book that clicked for both her and the market, a modern mystery with classic locked-room bones.

That book was Death in the Family, published in 2020. It introduced Shana Merchant, a former NYPD detective trying to rebuild her life in the Thousand Islands of upstate New York, and it immediately showed what Wegert does well: pressure-cooker settings, strong procedural threads, and characters carrying more than they say out loud. Readers who like smart puzzles and tense atmospheres usually settle in fast.

She kept building from there with The Dead Season, Dead Wind, The Kind to Kill, Devils at the Door, and The Coldest Case. Across those books, she mixes police work with personal history, family loyalties, buried secrets, and the long aftereffects of trauma. The mysteries are twisty, but the emotional thread is just as important, especially Shana's struggle to trust herself again.

Place matters a lot in Wegert's books.

Her fiction makes strong use of the Thousand Islands and the wider borderland between New York and Canada. The islands, ferries, river weather, summer crowds, winter isolation, and close-knit towns are never just backdrop. In In the Bones, the first North Country novel, she opens that world wider and shifts toward a broader community mystery, showing that her interest is not only in who committed the crime, but in what a place is willing to overlook until it can't anymore.

Before fiction took over, Wegert spent about twenty years working in journalism and content development, and that experience still shapes the work. Her plots are clean, the investigative details feel grounded, and even when the stories get dark, the writing stays clear. She has also written nonfiction for publications including The Economist, Forbes, Adweek, and The Globe and Mail.

Now she lives in Connecticut with her husband and children. She co-founded Sisters in Crime CT and serves on the board of International Thriller Writers. In interviews, she has also talked about studying martial arts and dance, which feels fitting for a writer whose books balance control, movement, and nerves.