Order of Sarah Graves Books

Born in 1951, Sarah Graves—real name Mary Squibb—crafted an unexpected literary legacy from the quaint, sea-washed corners of Eastport, Maine, a town as full of secrets as it is charm. Before she became a mystery writer with a cult following, Graves walked a more conventional path, earning her education at Brown University, one of the Ivy League’s bastions of literary thought. But it wasn’t academia or high literary circles that would define her legacy—it was drywall, dust, and death. That’s right. Graves didn’t just write about murder—she hung it in door frames and tucked it behind insulation.

Before turning to fiction, she worked in the publishing world and even dabbled in corporate writing, but the thrill of mystery always beckoned. And not just any mystery—the kind you might stumble upon while fixing a leaky faucet in your century-old house. Her “Home Repair is Homicide” series, which debuted in 1998 with The Dead Cat Bounce, wasn’t just a catchy pun. It was a revolution: DIY meets CSI. The series introduced readers to Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree, a former Wall Street financial advisor turned amateur sleuth and renovation enthusiast. The books are part cozy, part how-to, part whodunit—and altogether irresistible.

But Graves didn’t stop with cozy small-town crimes. In her later years, she shifted gears and tone, launching a darker, more chilling series featuring Lizzie Snow, a state police officer with a shadowy past and a sharp eye for rural menace. With books like Winter at the Door and A Darkness Absolute, Graves proved she could turn up the suspense as well as the screwdriver.

Sarah Graves is still alive as of 2025, living in the very same Eastport that inspired her fiction—a place where the locals nod knowingly when her fictional crimes mirror a bit too much of the town gossip. There’s something both whimsical and gothic about her career: the writer who turned creaky floorboards into clues and hammer-swinging heroines into icons.

Her books may read like blueprints for chaos, but her life? It’s a master class in reinvention. From Ivy League student to queen of cozy mayhem, Sarah Graves proves that you don’t have to choose between carpentry and crime-solving—you can have both, with a crowbar in one hand and a plot twist in the other.