Wendy Roberts Books in Order

Wendy Roberts was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and she has never forgotten what prairie weather can do to a person. She was telling stories young. At seven, she wrote a piece about a cup of flour on its way to becoming a birthday cake, which feels like a fitting origin story for a writer who likes odd setups and everyday details.

She was hooked.

Roberts did not publish right away. She has said she began writing novels in the late 1990s, after years of regular work and family life, and she once joked that she first truly felt like a writer when a royalty cheque helped cover the bills. That practical streak shows up in her fiction, where even the most unusual heroines still have jobs, rent, bad relationships, and too many reasons to worry.

Her first published novel, Dating Can Be Deadly, arrived in 2005. It introduces Tabitha Emery, a law office receptionist whose unwanted clairvoyance drags her into a murder case. Roberts was already leaning into the kind of story she still likes best, an ordinary woman, one paranormal twist, and a mystery that gets personal fast.

With The Remains of the Dead, she moved into the series work many readers know her for. That book launched the Ghost Dusters mysteries and introduced Sadie Novak, a Seattle crime scene cleaner who can see and talk to the dead. Follow-up novels such as Devil May Ride, Dead and Kicking, Dead Suite, and Drop Dead Beauty keep Sadie moving between grisly cleanup jobs, romantic complications, and ghosts that refuse to stay quiet.

Roberts likes heroines who do not feel built for danger.

She has said she writes about normal, careworn women who have one unusual gift that pushes them beyond their comfort zone. You can see that clearly in Grounds to Kill, where barista Jen Hamby receives messages from beyond, and in the Bodies of Evidence books, beginning with A Grave Calling, where Julie Hall uses dowsing rods to find the dead. The later Julie novels, A Grave Search, A Grave Peril, and A Grave End, lean darker, mixing missing person cases with trauma, addiction, and real physical threat.

More recently, she opened another line of paranormal suspense with Burning Hope, the first Red Hooper mystery. Its drifter heroine rolls into town in a camper van, finds a dead body instead of a quiet cup of coffee, and has to face both her secrets and her psychic abilities. That setup says a lot about Roberts's fiction, trouble arrives fast, but character comes first.

Although she lives in Vancouver, Roberts sets her books in Washington State and around Seattle. She has talked about taking research trips across the border so her locations feel real on the page. That grounding helps her stories feel lived-in, even when ghosts are talking or dowsing rods are pointing toward buried bodies.

Off the page, she describes herself as an armchair sleuth and a fan of all things mysterious, while also admitting she is a huge chicken at heart. She has spoken about raising four children and later becoming an empty nester, and her author notes often sound like dispatches from a slightly offbeat real life, Vancouver, a camper van, feral cats, rogue raccoons, and another murder plot always in the works.

That mix of nerves, humor, and curiosity is the through line in her books.