Jacqueline Kirby Books in Order

The Jacqueline Kirby novels introduce a very different kind of Peters heroine. Jacqueline is a middle‑aged Nebraska librarian with magnificent red hair, sharp green eyes and a bottomless handbag that seems to contain everything from safety pins to manuscripts. She is observant, nosy in the best way and utterly unwilling to let bullies have the last word.

When readers first meet her in The Seventh Sinner, Jacqueline is spending time in Rome, where a group of international students has nicknamed themselves the Seven Sinners. After one of them is murdered in the Temple of Mithra and another, Jean Suttman, becomes the focus of a series of near‑fatal accidents, Jacqueline steps in. She looks like a harmless tourist, but she watches everyone and is willing to pry secrets out of scholars, landlords and police alike.

Later books drop Jacqueline into other closed communities with strong obsessions. In The Murders of Richard III she attends a costumed weekend at an English country house filled with devotees determined to clear the name of the much‑debated king; when staged "pranks" based on historical murders turn lethal, she is the outsider who sees through the pageantry. Die for Love takes place at a romance‑writers' convention in New York, where feuds, pen names and publishing gossip provide more than enough motive for murder. In Naked Once More she wins a competition to write the sequel to a vanished author's blockbuster novel and moves to the writer's Appalachian hometown, where half the population has a reason to keep the past buried.

Across the series Jacqueline gradually shifts from librarian to bestselling author herself, but she always relies on the same tools, a trained memory, a love of research, a willingness to ask impolite questions and a solid moral sense that murder is never just a puzzle. The prose has fun with genre conventions, especially in the books that dissect the romance and mystery industries from the inside.

Although the four novels stand alone, reading them in order lets you watch Jacqueline reinvent her life while her personality stays gloriously consistent. Whether she is stalking a killer through Roman catacombs or staring down an editor in a conference bar, you can count on her to be practical, sardonic and three steps ahead of almost everyone else in the room.