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Joanne Fluke Books in Order
Below is the complete list of Joanne Fluke books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
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Hannah Swensen Series
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (2000)
Buy on Amazon - Strawberry Shortcake Murder (2001)
Buy on Amazon - Blueberry Muffin Murder (2001)
Buy on Amazon - Lemon Meringue Pie Murder (2003)
Buy on Amazon - Fudge Cupcake Murder (2004)
Buy on Amazon - Sugar Cookie Murder (2004)
Buy on Amazon - Peach Cobbler Murder (2005)
Buy on Amazon - Cherry Cheesecake Murder (2006)
Buy on Amazon - Key Lime Pie Murder (2007)
Buy on Amazon - Candy Cane Murder (2007)
Buy on Amazon - Candy for Christmas (2008)
Buy on Amazon - Carrot Cake Murder (2008)
Buy on Amazon - Cream Puff Murder (2008)
Buy on Amazon - Plum Pudding Murder (2009)
Buy on Amazon - Apple Turnover Murder (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Gingerbread Cookie Murder (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Devil’s Food Cake Murder (2011)
Buy on Amazon - Cinnamon Roll Murder (2012)
Buy on Amazon - Red Velvet Cupcake Murder (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Blackberry Pie Murder (2014)
Buy on Amazon - Double Fudge Brownie Murder (2015)
Buy on Amazon - Wedding Cake Murder (2016)
Buy on Amazon - Christmas Caramel Murder (2016)
Buy on Amazon - Banana Cream Pie Murder (2017)
Buy on Amazon - Raspberry Danish Murder (2019)
Buy on Amazon - Christmas Cake Murder (2019)
Buy on Amazon - Chocolate Cream Pie Murder (2019)
Buy on Amazon - Coconut Layer Cake Murder (2020)
Buy on Amazon - Christmas Cupcake Murder (2020)
Buy on Amazon - Triple Chocolate Cheesecake Murder (2021)
Buy on Amazon - Christmas Dessert Murder (2021)
Buy on Amazon - Caramel Pecan Roll Murder (2022)
Buy on Amazon - Pink Lemonade Cake Murder (2023)
Buy on Amazon
Standalone Novels Series
- The Stepchild (1980)
Buy on Amazon - The Other Child (1983)
Buy on Amazon - Winter Chill (1984)
Buy on Amazon - Cold Judgment (1985)
Buy on Amazon - Vengeance is Mine (1986)
Buy on Amazon - Video Kill (1989)
Buy on Amazon - Final Appeal (1989)
Buy on Amazon - Dead Giveaway (1990)
Buy on Amazon - Fatal Identity (1993)
Buy on Amazon - Deadly Memories (1995)
Buy on Amazon - Eyes (1996)
Buy on Amazon - Wicked (1996)
(By Jo Gibson)
Buy on Amazon - A Match For Melissa (1998)
Buy on Amazon - Caitlyn’s Cowboy (1999)
Buy on Amazon - A Season For Samantha (1999)
Buy on Amazon - A Husband For Holly (1999)
Buy on Amazon - A Valentine For Vanessa (2000)
Buy on Amazon - Cookies and Kisses (2000)
Buy on Amazon - A Townhouse for Tessa (2001)
Buy on Amazon
Non-Fiction Series
- Joanne Fluke’s Lake Eden Cookbook (2011)
Buy on Amazon
About Joanne Fluke
Joanne Fluke is best known as the creator of Hannah Swensen, one of the most durable and commercially successful figures in modern cozy mystery. If her bibliography is reduced to a single defining achievement, it is that series: a long-running blend of small-town mystery, baking culture, recurring relationships, and comfort-reading structure that helped make culinary cozies a major publishing lane. Fluke did not simply write mysteries that happened to include recipes. She built an entire reading experience around them, one in which murder, community gossip, romance, and dessert all became part of the same recognizable world.
Born Joanne Gibson in Swanville, Minnesota, she later lived in Southern California, but her fiction remained strongly shaped by the small-town Midwestern atmosphere she knew early in life. That background matters because the Hannah Swensen books are not generic cozies dropped into an interchangeable setting. Lake Eden, Minnesota, has a specific social texture: familiar, watchful, intimate, a place where ordinary routines and hidden tensions sit very close together. Fluke understood how to use that environment well. The appeal of the books comes not only from the mystery plots, but from the sense that readers are returning to a lived-in town with stable rhythms and familiar people.
Her career is also broader than many readers realize. Before and alongside the Hannah Swensen novels, Fluke wrote under several other names, including Jo Gibson, Kathryn Kirkwood, Chris Hunter, Gina Jackson, John Fischer, and R. J. Fischer. Those pseudonyms covered different kinds of commercial fiction, including young adult horror, romance, and suspense. That matters because it shows she was not simply a one-series success who found a formula by accident. She had experience writing for popular audiences in multiple modes before Hannah Swensen became the center of her reputation.
Still, the Hannah books are the key to understanding her place in genre fiction. Beginning with Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, the series established a pattern that readers returned to again and again: Hannah as baker and amateur sleuth, The Cookie Jar as social hub, murder intruding into ordinary life, and recipes woven directly into the book. That recipe element was not a gimmick added at the margins. It became part of the series identity and one reason the books stood out so clearly within the cozy mystery field. Fluke’s work offered readers not just a puzzle, but a whole domestic atmosphere—food, conversation, weather, family, local business, romantic entanglements, and a reassuring return to place.
Her bibliography is best understood in layers. First are the Hannah Swensen novels themselves, which form the backbone of her career and the main reason most readers seek out her books in order. Then there are companion works tied to that world, including cookbooks and related material that extend the series experience beyond the core mysteries. Finally, there is the earlier and more varied pseudonymous fiction, which shows a writer comfortable with commercial storytelling long before her signature success arrived.
Fluke’s style is not built around hard-edged realism or procedural exactness. She writes for pleasure, continuity, and familiarity, but that does not mean her work is slight. The success of the Hannah Swensen books depends on consistency of tone, on a stable fictional community, and on a very clear understanding of what readers want from this kind of series. Her novels promise murder without bleakness, suspense without brutality, and domestic detail without losing narrative motion. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks.
The best way to understand Joanne Fluke’s bibliography, then, is not as a scattered collection of unrelated commercial titles, but as the work of a writer who found an enduring fictional mode and refined it over decades. She became, in effect, one of the defining architects of the culinary cozy mystery. Even readers who have never read every Hannah Swensen novel usually recognize the shape of what she created: a bakery, a small town, a murder, a recipe, and the comforting certainty that the world may be disrupted, but not permanently broken.
Series: Joanne Fluke