Below is the complete list of Catherine Bruns books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Cookies & Chance Mysteries Books
Publication Order of Cindy York Books
- For Sale By Killer (2018)
For Sale By Killer is a 2018 release and appears as book #3 in the Cindy York series. 
Publication Order of Italian Chef Mysteries Books
Publication Order of Maple Syrup Mysteries Books
Publication Order of Aloha Lagoon Mysteries Books
Publication Order of High Heels Mysteries Books
with Gemma Halliday, Kelly Rey
About Catherine Bruns
Catherine Bruns is an American cozy mystery author best known for the Cookies & Chance mysteries, a long-running series that combines small-town crime, bakery humor, family complications, and amateur sleuthing. Her work sits firmly in the lighter end of the mystery genre: murders and motives drive the plots, but the appeal comes just as much from recurring characters, domestic tension, food-centered settings, and the comfortable rhythm of a fictional community where danger is serious without becoming grim or graphic.
Bruns is from Upstate New York, and that regional background fits naturally with the settings and social texture of her books. She holds a degree in English and Performing Arts and worked as a newspaper reporter and press release writer before building her fiction career. That background helps explain the clarity and pace of her storytelling. Her mysteries are approachable, dialogue-driven, and structured around clues, relationships, and everyday pressures rather than heavy procedural detail.
Her best-known work is the Cookies & Chance series, beginning with Tastes Like Murder. The books follow Sally “Sal” Muccio, a baker in the fictional town of Colwestern, New York, whose cookie business and personal life repeatedly intersect with murder investigations. The series gives Bruns a durable cozy framework: a food-based amateur sleuth, a close community, family and romantic threads, and titles that play on desserts, danger, and wordplay. Books such as Baked to Death, Frosted with Revenge, and Icing on the Casket show the tone clearly—playful on the surface, but still anchored by real mysteries and recurring emotional stakes.
Bruns has also written the Cindy York mysteries, centered on a real estate agent whose work naturally places her inside houses, transactions, rivalries, and secrets. That premise gives the series a slightly different engine from the bakery books. Instead of a food business bringing people together, the real estate world creates opportunities for hidden motives, strained finances, neighborhood tensions, and clients with something to conceal. For Sale by Killer, one of the key titles in this part of her bibliography, won the 2019 Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery/Suspense, marking one of the more notable recognitions of her career.
Her Italian Chef mysteries add another culinary branch to her bibliography, beginning with Penne Dreadful. The series follows Tessa Esposito and uses Italian cooking, family ties, and grief-tinged investigation to give the books their identity. Bruns continued her food-and-mystery lane with the Maple Syrup mysteries, starting with A Doomful of Sugar, which shifts the setting to a Vermont maple syrup farm and follows Leila Khoury after a family death brings her home. She has also contributed to the Aloha Lagoon world through the Carrie Jorgenson culinary mysteries.
Across these series, Bruns’s strongest signature is the way she uses familiar cozy-mystery pleasures without making each setting feel identical. Bakeries, real estate, Italian cooking, resort life, and maple syrup production all give her sleuths different social circles and practical reasons to encounter suspects. Her books are best understood as character-forward cozies built for readers who enjoy recurring casts, food, family friction, humor, and mysteries that resolve within a welcoming fictional world.