PJ Tracy Books in Order

For the classic Monkeewrench arc: Monkeewrench → Live Bait → Dead Run → Snow Blind.
For later Monkeewrench cases: The Sixth Idea → Nothing Stays Buried → The Guilty Dead → Ice Cold Heart.
For the Los Angeles detective series: Deep into the Dark → Desolation Canyon.
For a short seasonal change of pace: Return of the Magi.

PJ Tracy is the shared pen name of Patricia P.J. Lambrecht and her daughter, Traci Lambrecht. Their writing life was rooted in Minnesota, though for much of the Monkeewrench years they worked at a distance, with P.J. near Minneapolis and Traci in Los Angeles. That split geography suited their fiction: cold Twin Cities crime scenes, dry humor, tech trouble, and later a darker, sun-baked Los Angeles.

P.J. Lambrecht liked to joke that she was a college dropout with no real qualification for writing except a talent for lying. The joke undersold the work. She published a short story in The Saturday Evening Post when Traci was still a child, then built a long freelance and genre-writing career.

Traci grew up riding and showing horses. She graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a Russian Studies major and also studied voice. For a while, she imagined a life involving espionage, travel, and music. The Cold War ended, the spy plan went sideways, and writing became the thing that paid for the habits she loved, including singing in rock bands.

A family business was born.

Before Monkeewrench, mother and daughter wrote together under several names and in several genres. Their process sounded less like a formal partnership and more like two sharp storytellers trying to make each other laugh, scare each other, and then turn the best pieces into a plot. The age gap helped. So did the closeness.

Monkeewrench, published in 2003, changed the scale of everything. It introduced Grace MacBride and her odd, brilliant software crew, along with Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth. The setup was clean and nasty: a crime-solving computer game starts predicting real murders. The book won major first-novel mystery awards and launched a series that mixed police work, computer forensics, wounded characters, and jokes at exactly the wrong moment.

The series had teeth, but it also had jokes.

They followed it with books such as Live Bait, Dead Run, Snow Blind, The Sixth Idea, and Nothing Stays Buried. Readers tend to come back for the balance: grim crimes, fast plotting, and a cast that feels like a found family with excellent technical skills and terrible luck. The books often circle questions of trust, old trauma, revenge, and the way new technology gives old human cruelty fresh tools.

P.J. died in December 2016 after a long illness. Nothing Stays Buried was the last Monkeewrench novel she and Traci worked on together. Traci continued writing as PJ Tracy with The Guilty Dead and Ice Cold Heart, then began the Detective Margaret Nolan series with Deep into the Dark, shifting the action to Los Angeles and a different kind of police procedural.

Today Traci lives in Minnesota and continues to write under the PJ Tracy name. It remains a good fit. The name carries the mother-daughter spark that started the books, and it gives Traci room to keep telling murder stories with bite, grief, and a welcome streak of wisecracking survival.