Below is the complete list of Krista Davis’ Pen and Ink books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Pen and Ink Books
About Pen and Ink
Krista Davis’s Pen and Ink Mysteries combine bookstore life, adult coloring art, and traditional cozy-mystery plotting in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The series follows Florrie Fox, manager of the independent Color Me Read bookstore and an artist who creates intricately detailed coloring books in her spare time. Her two occupations give the books a distinctive identity: literary events, authors, collectors, rare books, and publishing personalities provide one side of Florrie’s world, while drawing and visual observation influence the way she notices details during an investigation.
Florrie is introduced in Color Me Murder after taking a job managing Color Me Read for Professor John Maxwell. She also moves into a carriage house on Maxwell’s property, an arrangement intended partly to protect the house from relatives who have their own ideas about who should control it. When Maxwell’s nephew Delbert is found murdered inside the bookstore, the professor becomes an obvious suspect. Florrie’s loyalty to her employer and her conviction that the case is more complicated than it appears pull her into her first investigation.
The bookstore provides a particularly flexible setting for the series. Customers, authors, collectors, employees, publishing professionals, and neighborhood residents pass through Color Me Read, giving Florrie regular contact with people who bring their own rivalries and secrets. Book signings and literary events can assemble suspects naturally, while questions involving valuable or unusual books provide motives that differ from the domestic disputes common to many cozies.
That becomes especially important in The Coloring Crook, where a rare book discovered through a garage sale leads into murder. Davis uses the situation to bring collecting, book value, ownership, and hidden provenance into the mystery while keeping Florrie’s personal relationships and bookstore responsibilities active around the investigation.
Florrie’s work as a coloring-book creator distinguishes her from a conventional bookseller-sleuth. She spends considerable time studying shapes, patterns, decorative details, and objects that might inspire an illustration. Those habits translate naturally into investigative observation. She is not solving crimes because artistic talent gives her some implausible special power; rather, years of looking carefully at visual details make her inclined to notice things other people dismiss.
The series also makes unusually playful use of its physical books. The first volumes were published with front and back covers designed so readers could color them themselves, extending Florrie’s artistic profession beyond the fictional story. That feature is more than a marketing curiosity because coloring remains part of her identity throughout the series.
Later books widen the social world around Color Me Read. Murder Outside the Lines uses the approach of Halloween and an appearance by a psychic author to introduce a more atmospheric mystery, while A Colorful Scheme moves into the pressures and rivalries surrounding a wedding involving Florrie’s boss and a successful romance novelist. By then, recurring relationships—including Florrie’s romance with Sergeant Eric Jonquille—have given the series continuity beyond the crimes themselves.
The Pen and Ink series currently consists of four novels, published between 2018 and 2022. Unlike Davis’s longer Domestic Diva and Paws and Claws series, it remains a compact body of work centered closely on Florrie, Color Me Read, and Georgetown.
What gives the books their character is the overlap between reading and seeing. Florrie spends her professional life surrounded by stories and her creative life translating the world into images. Both habits serve her well when murder requires her to look again at people and situations that initially appear straightforward—and notice the detail that does not belong.