Below is the complete list of Maddie Day’s Country Store Mysteries books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Country Store Mysteries Books
About Country Store Mysteries
Maddie Day’s Country Store Mysteries center on Robbie Jordan, a chef and carpenter who leaves California for the fictional town of South Lick in southern Indiana and creates a new life around Pans ’N Pancakes, her country-store restaurant and vintage cookware shop. Written by Edith Maxwell under the Maddie Day name, the series combines traditional cozy mystery plotting with food, small-business pressures, rural Midwestern life, and a community whose friendships and disagreements gradually become as important as the individual crimes. Flipped for Murder launched the series in 2015.
Robbie’s career is unusually important to the character. She trained as a chef but also learned carpentry from her late mother, skills that allow her to renovate an old country store into the restaurant she wants to run. Pans ’N Pancakes serves breakfast and lunch while also selling vintage cookware, giving Robbie daily contact with customers, neighboring businesses, tourists, suppliers, and longtime residents. Her restaurant becomes both a professional achievement and the social center from which many of the mysteries naturally emerge.
South Lick is modeled on the wooded hill country of southern Indiana, particularly Brown County, where Day once lived. The fictional town lies near real communities and landmarks, allowing the books to mix invented businesses and residents with recognizable regional details. Farms, covered bridges, festivals, music, local food traditions, churches, rural roads, and neighboring Nashville all contribute to the setting. Robbie’s Aunt Adele, who lives on a sheep farm outside town, provides another important family connection to the area.
The mysteries make effective use of that community rather than restricting every crime to the restaurant. Local festivals, winter weather, food competitions, knitting circles, farm properties, antique businesses, and community disputes all provide settings in which murder can disrupt ordinary South Lick life. Nacho Average Murder briefly takes Robbie back to Santa Barbara, demonstrating that the series can move beyond Indiana when her personal history requires it, but South Lick remains its emotional and narrative center.
Robbie’s personal life also develops substantially across the books. Relationships that begin as friendships or romantic possibilities are allowed to change, while her connection to Aunt Adele and other recurring residents deepens as she becomes less of a newcomer and more firmly embedded in the town. Her relationship with electrician Abe O’Neill eventually becomes especially important. By Scone Cold Dead, Robbie and Abe are married and preparing for the birth of their first child, a development that shows how far her life has progressed from the woman establishing a new restaurant at the beginning of the series.
Food remains a constant part of that progression. Robbie cooks for customers rather than simply enjoying food as a hobby, so menus, ingredients, kitchen equipment, staffing, and the practical demands of running a restaurant remain part of her everyday life even when she is investigating. Each Country Store mystery also includes recipes connected to dishes Robbie serves or encounters during the story.
The series includes thirteen full-length novels through Scone Cold Dead, along with the shorter holiday mysteries Christmas Cocoa Murder and Christmas Scarf Murder. Its continuity, however, comes less from an overarching criminal plot than from Robbie’s changing place within South Lick. She arrives looking for a fresh start and gradually builds a business, family, friendships, and permanent home, while every new case reveals another layer of the community she has chosen to make her own.