About Every Book In Order

Who we are

We are readers first. Not an algorithm, not a content farm, not a side project run by someone who mostly reads thrillers and is doing cosy crime as a market opportunity. Every Book In Order is written and maintained by people who have strong opinions about whether you should start Louise Penny at Still Life or The Long Way Home (you start at Still Life, there is no debate), who have read Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series twice and felt it differently the second time, and who will cheerfully argue about whether the Amish Candy Shop mysteries are better in a single sitting or rationed across a month.

We cover cosy crime exclusively. Not general fiction, not literary thrillers, not the kind of book described as “cosy” by a publicist who means it has a village in it and someone dies tastefully. Actual cosy crime: amateur sleuths, recurring characters, a sense that the world is manageable, and endings that do not leave you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning.

What we do

We track every series, every prequel, every spin-off, every novella that got bundled into a Christmas anthology and then quietly listed on Goodreads. We check publication dates. We check whether the author has said anywhere that there is a preferred reading order that differs from publication order (sometimes there is, and it matters).

We write about every book we cover based on having actually read it. Not reworded back-cover copy. Not aggregated review summaries. If a book in a series is weaker than the others, we say so, because you deserve to know before committing to book eleven of a seventeen-book series.

How we choose what to cover

We start with what we love, which means Gamache in Three Pines, Maisie Dobbs between the wars, Inspector Chopra and his baby elephant in modern Bombay, Charley Davidson talking to dead people in Albuquerque. Darynda Jones, Vaseem Khan, Amanda Flower, Richard Osman. Authors who have built something worth reading in order, where the characters accumulate history and the world gets richer as it goes.

We add new series when they earn it. A debut novel that shows a writer who knows how to build a world. A series that has been around for years and somehow missed our list. Reader suggestions that turn out to be exactly as good as promised. We do not cover everything. We cover what we would actually recommend to someone asking for a good cosy crime series on a train platform with five minutes before their train leaves.

Why reading order matters

With most books, it does not. With cosy crime series, it often does, and sometimes it really does. Armand Gamache carries things from book one to book seventeen. Maisie Dobbs is changed by the war in ways that compound across the series. Start Winspear mid-series and you can enjoy the mystery, but you are missing what makes it worth reading.

Some authors write series where the books stand alone and order is loose. We note that too. But when reading in order makes a material difference to what you get from the books, we think you should know that before you start, not eight books in when you realise there has been an emotional thread running through all of them that you have been reading backwards.

We are not precious about it. Start wherever you like. We just want to tell you what you are deciding.

Get in touch

If we have got something wrong, missed a book in a series, or if you think there is an author we should cover, we want to hear from you. If you have a strong opinion about reading order that differs from ours, we are also interested in that, provided it is an opinion and not just a preference for chaos.