Julia Spencer-Fleming Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: In the Bleak Midwinter → A Fountain Filled with Blood → Out of the Deep I Cry
If you like character driven drama and romance: All Mortal Flesh → I Shall Not Want → One Was a Soldier
If you prefer high stakes thrillers: Through the Evil Days → Hid from Our Eyes → At Midnight Comes the Cry
If you just want a quick series sampler: Letters to a Soldier followed by One Was a Soldier

Julia Spencer-Fleming was born in 1961 at the Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York, the daughter of a military family that rarely stayed in one place for long. She has called Alabama, New York, Italy, Germany, and more home at different points in her childhood.

That constant moving, from Montgomery to Rome, Stuttgart, and Syracuse, helped give her the eye for communities and outsiders that runs through her fiction.

She studied acting and history at Ithaca College before going on to graduate work in Washington DC and eventually earning a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law. Before her first novel sold, she juggled life as a stay at home mother of two with part time legal work in Portland, Maine, then added a third child and a full time job at a law firm while still writing at night.

Spencer-Fleming knew she did not want to write another lawyer hero, so she reached back to two other parts of her life, her service in the army and her involvement with an Episcopal parish. The result was Clare Fergusson, an ex army helicopter pilot who becomes the first female priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill, and Russ Van Alstyne, the local police chief. Their debut in In the Bleak Midwinter introduced readers to a close knit upstate community and a partnership built on tension, faith, and dry humor.

The book won a string of major mystery awards for best first novel and launched a series that includes titles like A Fountain Filled with Blood, Out of the Deep I Cry, To Darkness and to Death, All Mortal Flesh, I Shall Not Want, One Was a Soldier, Through the Evil Days, Hid from Our Eyes, and At Midnight Comes the Cry.

In these stories Spencer-Fleming often starts with a familiar village mystery setup, then lets in the wider world. The books take on homophobia, environmental damage, the aftermath of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, addiction, domestic violence, and small town politics, all through the lens of people who have to meet each other every Sunday or at the grocery store. Clare’s collar and Russ’s badge both matter, but so do their doubts and mistakes.

Readers return to the series for the strong sense of place as much as for the puzzles. Snowstorms, spring mud, back roads, and old Adirondack camps shape the action, and side characters from parishioners to patrol officers get room to grow over time. The long running relationship between Clare and Russ, with its mix of longing, guilt, and hard won grace, gives the books a through line that feels as much like a family saga as a crime series.

Spencer-Fleming now lives in a two hundred year old farmhouse in rural Maine. Widowed in 2017, she keeps in touch with her grown children’s scattered lives and spends her days walking two energetic Shih Tzus, swimming in the Saco River when the weather cooperates, and stacking cords of firewood each autumn. Thanks to the continued life of Clare, Russ, and Millers Kill, she has happily left courtroom work behind for good.