Catherine Bruns Books in Order

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

Cookies & Chance Mysteries Series

1. Tastes Like Murder (2015)
2. Baked to Death (2016)
3. Burned to a Crisp (2016)
4. Frosted with Revenge (2017)
5. Silenced by Sugar (2018)
6. Crumbled to Pieces (2018)
7. Sprinkled in Malice (2019)
8. Ginger Snapped to Death (2019)
9. Icing on the Casket (2020)
10. Knee Deep in Dough (2021)
11. Dessert is the Bomb (2021)
12. Seasoned with Murder (2022)
13. Formals, Fortune Cookies & Fraud (2022)
14. Cookies, Chamomile, and Corpses (2023)
15. Bake, Batter, and Roll (2023)
16. Crimes and Confections (2024)
17. Planes, Candy Canes, and Hearses (2024)
18. Death Whisk (2025)

Cindy York Series

1. Killer Transaction (2015)
2. Priced to Kill (2016)
3. For Sale By Killer (2018)
4. Killer View (2022)
5. With Option to Kill (2023)
6. A Killer Market (2023)
7. Killer Under Contract (2024)
8. Killer Commission (2025)
9. A Christmas Killing In Deed (2026)

Italian Chef Mysteries Series

1. Penne Dreadful (2019)
2. It Cannoli Be Murder (2020)
3. The Enemy You Gnocchi (2021)

Maple Syrup Mysteries Series

1. A Doomful of Sugar (2022)
2. Syrup to No Good (2023)
3. In the Blink of a Pie (2024)

Aloha Lagoon Mysteries Series

1. Death of the Big Kahuna (2017)
2. Death of the Kona Man (2017)
3. Death of the Hula Girl (2025)

High Heels Mysteries Series
with Gemma Halliday, Kelly Rey

1. Jeopardy in High Heels (2020)
   (With Gemma Halliday)

About Catherine Bruns

Catherine Bruns is a contemporary cozy mystery writer whose bibliography is best understood through series rather than through one single dominant detective. She writes in a cheerful but murder-forward commercial mystery mode, and her official site presents that identity very clearly: she is a USA Today bestselling author with multiple recurring lines, including the Cookies & Chance Mysteries, Cindy York Mysteries, Aloha Lagoon books, Italian Chef Mysteries, Maple Syrup Mysteries, and a coauthored High Heels title with Gemma Halliday. That range matters because Bruns is not simply the author of one successful cozy concept. She has built a broader mystery shelf out of several different small-town, food-centered, and profession-driven setups.

Her official biography gives a useful sense of both background and tone. Bruns lives in Upstate New York with her husband, three sons, and a house full of pets, and she says she has wanted to be a writer since childhood, when she wrote her own version of Cinderella. She holds a B.A. in English and is affiliated with both Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Those details fit the overall feel of her work: approachable, genre-conscious, and written by someone clearly rooted in the mystery community rather than accidentally adjacent to it.

The clear center of gravity in her bibliography is the Cookies & Chance series. Her own site foregrounds it first, and outside listings consistently identify it as her signature line. That makes sense. A baker-centered cozy series is an ideal home for the things Bruns seems to enjoy most as a writer: community, recurring side characters, food detail, light humor, and murder plots designed to be brisk and inviting rather than bleak. The scale of the series also shows how central it has become. Public series listings and retailer pages now place it at fifteen books, with Death Whisk as the current fifteenth entry.

At the same time, her bibliography shows a writer who likes to vary the surrounding world even while staying inside the cozy lane. The Cindy York books shift to a real-estate angle, the Italian Chef series leans into culinary mystery from another direction, and the Maple Syrup Mysteries add a regional, seasonal identity of their own. Her site also lists her contributions to the Aloha Lagoon multi-author universe, which is another sign that she works comfortably inside shared cozy frameworks as well as her own named series. The through-line is not one protagonist or one town. It is a consistent mystery sensibility: warm setting, amateur or semi-amateur sleuthing energy, and crime made readable through charm rather than grit.

There are also some useful clues in how her work is received. Public author pages describe her as both bestselling and award winning, and Goodreads-style bio material notes that For Sale by Killer won the Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery/Suspense. That combination is telling. Bruns writes cozies first and foremost, but her work is not framed as disposable novelty. It has built a real readership and has picked up genre recognition along the way.

The best way to understand Catherine Bruns’s bibliography, then, is as the work of a cozy mystery writer who has expanded successfully by building several cleanly branded series rather than relying on one giant franchise. Her books promise familiar pleasures—food, community, recurring characters, small-scale suspense, and a light touch around death—and her shelf shows how effectively she has delivered those pleasures across multiple settings. She is not trying to reinvent the mystery genre. She is doing something more specific and commercially durable: making murder fun, approachable, and repeatable in worlds readers are happy to revisit.