Charlaine Harris Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Charlaine Harris books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.

Aurora Teagarden Books

1. Real Murders (1990)
2. A Bone to Pick (1992)
3. Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (1994)
4. The Julius House (1995)
5. Dead Over Heels (1996)
6. A Fool and His Honey (1999)
7. Last Scene Alive (2002)
8. Poppy Done to Death (2003)
9. All the Little Liars (2016)
10. Sleep Like a Baby (2017)

Lily Bard Books

1. Shakespeare’s Landlord (1996)
2. Shakespeare’s Champion (1997)
3. Shakespeare’s Christmas (1998)
4. Shakespeare’s Trollop (2000)
5. Shakespeare’s Counselor (2001)

Sookie Stackhouse Books

1. Dead Until Dark (2001)
2. Living Dead in Dallas (2002)
3. Club Dead (2003)
4. Dead to the World (2004)
5. Fairy Dust (2004)
6. Dead as a Doornail (2005)
7. Definitely Dead (2006)
8. All Together Dead (2007)
9. From Dead to Worse (2008)
10. Dead and Gone (2009)
11. A Touch of Dead (2009)
12. One Word Answer (2009)
13. Gift Wrap (2009)
14. Dead in the Family (2010)
15. True Blood Collection (2010)
16. Dead Reckoning (2011)
17. Deadlocked (2012)
18. Dancers in the Dark (2012)
19. Dead Ever After (2013)
20. After Dead (2013)

Sookie Stackhouse Collections Books

1. The First Sookie Collection (2011)
2. Games Creatures Play (2014)
3. The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories (2017)

Sookie Stackhouse Companion Books

1. The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (2011)

Harper Connelly Books

1. Grave Sight (2005)
2. Grave Surprise (2006)
3. An Ice Cold Grave (2007)
4. Grave Secret (2009)

Harper Connelly/Grave Sight Graphic Novels Books

1. Part 1 (2011)
2. Part 2 (2011)
3. Part 3 (2012)
4. Part 4 (2014)
5. Part 5 (2014)
6. Part 6 (2014)

Midnight, Texas Books

1. Midnight Crossroad (2014)
2. Day Shift (2015)
3. Night Shift (2016)

The Cemetery Girl Trilogy Books
with Christopher Golden

1. The Pretenders (2014)
2. Inheritance (2015)
3. Haunted (2018)

Gunnie Rose Books

1. An Easy Death (2018)
2. A Longer Fall (2020)
3. The Russian Cage (2021)
4. The Serpent in Heaven (2022)
5. All the Dead Shall Weep (2023)
6. The Last Wizards’ Ball (2025)

Standalone Novels Books

1. Sweet and Deadly (1981)
2. A Secret Rage (1984)

Short Stories/Novellas Books

1. Layla Steps Up (2017)
2. The One That Got Away (2022)

Short Story Collections Books

1. Small Kingdoms and Other Stories (2019)

Harper Connelly Graphic Novels Books
with William Harms

1. Grave Sight (2011)
   (With William Harms)
2. Charlaine Harris’ Grave Surprise (2016)

About Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris is an American novelist whose career has moved with unusual ease between mystery, urban fantasy, and supernatural suspense. She is best known for creating the Sookie Stackhouse novels, the series that became HBO’s True Blood, but that success sits inside a much broader body of work. On her official site, Harris notes that by 2023 she had been a published writer for forty-two years, and her publisher pages describe a bibliography that includes multiple long-running series, standalones, short fiction, and graphic work.

She was born on November 25, 1951, in Tunica, Mississippi, and was raised in the Mississippi Delta, a regional background that still echoes through much of her fiction. That Southern sense of place matters. Even when Harris writes about vampires, psychics, or alternate histories, her books tend to feel anchored in recognizable communities with social codes, gossip networks, and old loyalties. Biographical references also note that she studied at Rhodes College in Memphis, where she earned a degree in English.

Before she became associated with fantasy, Harris built her name in mystery. Her official site and publisher biographies list early and continuing series such as the Aurora Teagarden mysteries and the Lily Bard books, both of which helped establish her as a dependable and distinctive voice in crime-oriented fiction. Those series are a useful reminder that Harris did not begin as a one-franchise writer. She came up through character-driven mystery, with recurring leads, small-town texture, and a strong instinct for balancing suspense with personality.

That background helps explain why the Sookie Stackhouse books worked so well when they arrived. They are often remembered for vampires and supernatural politics, but structurally they are also mysteries: there are crimes, hidden motives, social codes, and a heroine trying to make sense of dangerous people and unstable situations. Harris’s publisher biography notes that the Sookie Stackhouse novels appeared in dozens of languages and became the basis for True Blood, which pushed her work to a much larger international audience. The TV adaptation made her famous well beyond mystery readers, but the books themselves still carry the same strengths visible in her earlier work—sharp pacing, strong recurring characters, and a world that feels inhabited rather than decorative.

One of the most useful ways to understand Harris’s career is by series rather than by genre label alone. After Sookie, she continued building other worlds: the Harper Connelly novels, the Midnight, Texas books, the Cemetery Girl graphic novels created with Christopher Golden, and the Gunnie Rose series set in an alternate-history America. Her official site’s “Books by Series” page lays that range out clearly. She writes mystery, fantasy, and supernatural fiction, but the common thread is not genre mechanics so much as the way she builds communities around unusual premises.

What has kept Charlaine Harris durable is that she writes strange material in a grounded way. Telepaths, vampires, and alternate frontiers enter her fiction, but the books still care about work, family, resentment, desire, and the ordinary social friction of people living near one another. That is why her stories tend to feel inviting even when the premise is fantastical. Readers get the imaginative hook, but they stay for the voice and the people.

Read in order, her books show a writer who never stayed confined to one lane for long. Mystery gave her the foundation, supernatural fiction widened her audience, and later series proved she could keep reinventing the shape of her fictional worlds without losing the clarity and momentum that made her successful in the first place.