Below is the complete list of Peggy Ehrhart books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Maxx Maxwell Mysteries Books
Publication Order of Quilt Whisperer Mystery Books
Publication Order of Collections Books
Publication Order of Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mysteries Books
with Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis
Publication Order of A Knit & Nibble Mystery Books
with Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis
Publication Order of Lucy Stone Books
with Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, Barbara Ross
About Peggy Ehrhart
Peggy Ehrhart is an American mystery writer whose fiction combines traditional whodunit plotting with the communities and interests she knows personally: knitting, quilting, cooking, music, and small-town life. She is best known for the Knit & Nibble mysteries, a cozy series featuring amateur sleuth Pamela Paterson and a New Jersey knitting circle, but her writing career began with a markedly different kind of crime fiction centered on the blues-music scene. Before turning to fiction full time, Ehrhart spent many years as an academic specializing in medieval literature.
Ehrhart holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Illinois and taught writing and literature at Queens College of the City University of New York and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her scholarly work included articles on medieval literature and the nonfiction study The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1987. She took early retirement from teaching in 2002, allowing her to devote more time to fiction and another longstanding interest, playing blues guitar.
That musical background directly influenced her first mystery series. Sweet Man Is Gone, published in 2008, introduced Elizabeth “Maxx” Maxwell, a blues singer involved in the world of struggling musicians and club performances. Ehrhart drew on her own experience playing guitar in a New York City-based blues band to create the setting. A second Maxx Maxwell mystery, Got No Friend Anyhow, followed in 2011. These books occupy a somewhat different territory from the cozies that later became her main focus, but they already demonstrate Ehrhart’s tendency to build mysteries around communities and activities she understands from firsthand experience.
Her best-known work began with Murder, She Knit in 2018. The Knit & Nibble series follows widowed crafting-magazine editor Pamela Paterson, the founder and central member of a knitting group in fictional Arborville, New Jersey. Pamela and her friend Bettina Fraser repeatedly find their quiet routines interrupted by suspicious deaths, with the club’s gatherings, local relationships, crafts, and food providing the social framework around each investigation. Ehrhart is herself a longtime knitter and enthusiastic cook, so these elements are integrated naturally into the characters’ everyday lives rather than functioning solely as a decorative cozy-mystery theme.
The Knit & Nibble books developed into a substantial series of full-length novels accompanied by holiday novellas contributed to multi-author mystery collections. Rather than radically changing its formula from installment to installment, the series builds its appeal through Arborville’s recurring community, Pamela’s friendships, and the gradual development of her personal life alongside new murder cases. The twelfth full-length novel, Last Wool and Testament, appeared in 2025, while the 2026 novella “An Eggy Way to Die” provides a concluding point for the original Knit & Nibble series and resolves an important continuing element involving Pamela and Richard.
Ehrhart has since shifted from knitting to quilting for another craft-centered mystery world. The Quilt Whisperer Mysteries feature Caroline Platte, a quilt and antique-quilt specialist working as a museum curator in fictional Banburyport, Massachusetts. Its opening novel, The Quilt Whisperer Investigates, is scheduled for publication in August 2026, giving Ehrhart a new setting and protagonist while retaining her interest in crafts as both serious expertise and the foundation of a mystery community.
Across these different phases, Ehrhart’s bibliography reflects the unusual combination of scholar, musician, crafter, and mystery writer. Medieval scholarship informed her first professional career, blues performance inspired Maxx Maxwell, and decades of knitting and quilting later supplied the texture of her cozy mysteries. The connecting element is her ability to build crime stories around specialized communities that feel inhabited before the murder ever occurs.