Below is the complete list of Laura Childs books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Tea Shop Mysteries Books
- Lavender Blue Murder (2020)
Lavender Blue Murder was published in 2020 and is listed as book #21 in the Tea Shop Mysteries series. 
Publication Order of Scrapbooking Mysteries Books
Publication Order of Cackleberry Club Books
About Laura Childs
Laura Childs is the pen name of American mystery writer Gerry Schmitt, best known for three long-running cozy mystery series: the Tea Shop Mysteries, the Scrapbook Mysteries, and the Cackleberry Club Mysteries. Her books combine amateur sleuthing with highly distinctive settings and hobbies, placing murders amid Charleston tea culture, New Orleans scrapbooking, and a Midwestern café run by three women. Under her own name, Schmitt has also written the darker Afton Tangler thrillers.
Before becoming a novelist, Schmitt worked in advertising and marketing, eventually serving as the CEO and creative director of her own marketing firm. That professional background is reflected in the strong visual identities of her mystery series. Each has a clearly defined setting, recurring cast, and lifestyle element that gives the books an identity beyond the crimes themselves.
She launched the Laura Childs name with Death by Darjeeling, the first Tea Shop Mystery. The novel introduced Theodosia Browning, proprietor of the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, South Carolina. Theodosia had left a corporate career to create a different life and soon proves equally capable at serving carefully prepared tea and investigating suspicious deaths.
The Tea Shop Mysteries became Childs’s largest and most enduring series. Theodosia is supported by tea expert Drayton Conneley and chef Haley Parker, while Charleston’s historic streets, mansions, gardens, festivals, museums, and social events provide a constantly changing background. Tea itself is woven into the books through blends, menus, traditions, and themed gatherings rather than functioning merely as decoration.
By 2026 the series had reached thirty novels with Death at a Firefly Tea, demonstrating its unusual longevity within contemporary cozy mystery. Childs has also continued planning further installments, including Buttermint Bomb. Although each novel contains a mystery that can generally be solved independently, the continuing relationships and gradual development of the Indigo Tea Shop make publication order the most satisfying approach.
Childs created a distinctly different environment for her Scrapbook Mysteries. Beginning with Keepsake Crimes, the series follows Carmela Bertrand, owner of the Memory Mine scrapbooking shop in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Her creative business places her at the center of a colorful community while the city supplies parades, cemeteries, historic buildings, food, festivals, and an atmosphere that can shift easily from celebratory to sinister.
The Scrapbook books mix mysteries with craft ideas and the exuberant personality of New Orleans. Carmela’s friendship with Ava Gruiex is particularly important to the series, while her complicated relationships and involvement with local law enforcement add longer-running personal threads. Childs has written several later entries in the series with Terrie Farley Moran.
Her third major cozy sequence, the Cackleberry Club Mysteries, moves to the fictional Midwestern town of Kindred. The series centers on Suzanne Dietz and her friends Toni Garrett and Petra Webb, who operate the Cackleberry Club, a café that also incorporates a book nook and knitting area. Its breakfast-centered setting gives the books a warmer small-town atmosphere while still allowing the protagonists to encounter a remarkably steady stream of murders.
Food, friendship, and reinvention are especially prominent in the Cackleberry Club novels. The three women have experienced major changes in their personal lives and create the business partly as a way of rebuilding. Their café consequently serves as both a commercial enterprise and a gathering place through which they become involved in local relationships, disputes, and investigations.
Schmitt has also shown a different side of her writing under her real name. Little Girl Gone introduced Afton Tangler, a Minneapolis Police Department family liaison officer drawn into a disturbing kidnapping investigation. The Afton Tangler books are considerably darker and more action-oriented than the Laura Childs cozies, emphasizing police work, violent crime, and thriller pacing.
Across her work as Laura Childs, however, the defining appeal lies in the contrast between inviting environments and serious crimes. Tea rooms, scrapbook shops, cafés, festivals, craft projects, meals, and friendships create communities readers can return to repeatedly, while murder disrupts those spaces and gives the protagonists a reason to investigate.
Childs has built her career by making those settings unusually specific. Theodosia’s Charleston is different from Carmela’s New Orleans, just as both differ from Suzanne’s Midwestern community. That separation has allowed all three series to develop distinctive personalities while retaining the combination of mystery, friendship, food, crafts, and recurring characters that made Laura Childs a prominent name in modern cozy crime.