Goldy Schulz

The Goldy Schulz series is one of the defining works of culinary mystery fiction. Diane Mott Davidson launched it in 1990 with Catering to Nobody and continued it for seventeen novels over more than two decades, finishing with The Whole Enchilada in 2013. The series is complete, which is part of what makes it so satisfying to read in full: there is a genuine arc here, not just an ongoing franchise.

Goldy is a caterer in Aspen Meadow, a fictional small town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. She is a single mother rebuilding her life after leaving an abusive marriage — not metaphorically rebuilding, but practically: the catering business is her rent, her son’s school fees, and her self-respect all at once. Murder has a way of finding her clients, her events, and her community, and Goldy proves again and again that she cannot leave well enough alone. This is not stupidity. It is the particular stubbornness of someone who has already survived something terrible and emerged with a lowered threshold for accepting things being wrong.

The darkness in Goldy’s backstory — her abusive ex-husband, who does not disappear from the series when she leaves him — gives these books a texture that distinguishes them from lighter culinary mysteries. Double Shot confronts this directly, when the ex turns up dead and Goldy becomes the prime suspect. Davidson does not flinch from the complexity of what Goldy feels. The books are warm and funny and full of excellent food, but they do not pretend that Goldy’s past is simply past.

Every book includes real, tested recipes for the dishes Goldy prepares. This is not decorative — the food is woven into the fabric of each story, and many readers have built a genuine cookbook collection from the series over the years. The recipes work. They reflect the Colorado setting: substantial, mountainous, built for cold weather and high altitude.

The setting matters enormously. Aspen Meadow feels like a real place: insular, scenic, and full of the kind of long-simmering tensions that only small towns produce. Davidson renders the Colorado mountain environment with enough specificity — the thin air, the sudden weather, the particular social dynamics of a wealthy resort-adjacent community — that it becomes a character in its own right.

Reading Order Guidance

Read in publication order. Goldy’s personal life — her romance and eventual marriage to detective Tom Schulz, her son Arch’s journey from boy to young man, and her complicated feelings about her past — develops continuously across all seventeen books. The emotional payoff in later novels depends on the groundwork laid in earlier ones. Each book solves its central mystery, so you can pause between entries, but the series rewards readers who go cover to cover. The seventeen books are seventeen years of a life, and it shows.

Who Will Enjoy This Series

If you love the Goldy Schulz books, try Joanne Fluke for cosy mysteries built around a small-town bakery, or Cleo Coyle for food-themed mysteries with a strong female lead navigating both crime and a complicated personal life. Fluke is lighter and more purely comic; Coyle has similar grit. Neither has quite Davidson’s feel for how food and difficulty coexist in a real life.