Scrapbooking Mysteries in Order: All 16 Books (Laura Childs)

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Memory Mine is a scrapbooking shop on a French Quarter side street, and its owner, Carmela Bertrand, spends her working day cutting photo mats and talking customers out of buying more ribbon. She also keeps finding bodies — at Mardi Gras parades, in cemeteries, at Halloween parties, once in a clothes dryer — which is how Laura Childs has filled sixteen novels set in a city she clearly adores.

This is the complete Scrapbooking Mystery reading order: all sixteen books with their publication years, a spoiler-free line or two on each, where to start, and what the series is doing now. (Laura Childs calls them the Scrapbook Mysteries on her own website; Berkley prints “A Scrapbooking Mystery” on the covers, so both names are correct.)

Scrapbooking Mysteries in Order: All 16 Books

The titles and numbering below match Laura Childs’s own series page and Penguin Random House’s listing, which both stop at sixteen. The years are first-publication years, cross-checked against Penguin Random House’s edition dates; note that the series ran almost annually to 2016, skipped 2017, and has been quiet since 2019.

1. Keepsake Crimes (2003). The Pluvius parade is rolling through the French Quarter when a body is handed down off the sea-serpent float, and the police decide that Carmela Bertrand’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, Shamus Meechum, is the man they want for it. Carmela runs Memory Mine, a scrapbooking shop a few streets away, and the clue that finally matters turns up in a customer’s album.
2. Photo Finished (2004). Memory Mine hosts an all-night crop — rubber stamping, hand-tinted photographs, rum drinks and praline pie — and the evening ends with Bartholomew Hayward, the shifty antiques dealer next door, dead in the back alley. Since every suspect is one of her own customers, Carmela has an obvious interest in getting there before the police do.
3. Bound for Murder (2004). Carmela is lettering place cards for a friend’s pre-wedding dinner when the groom is found with a butcher knife in his neck, and the stunned bride asks her to look into it. The trail runs out of the restaurant and into the bayou, by way of a very territorial rare-book collector.
4. Motif for Murder (2006). The one set in a city still digging itself out: New Orleans is rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, Shamus has been kidnapped, his Uncle Henry is dead, and a scrapbook holds the thread that ties the two together. Berkley reissued it in mass-market paperback in 2007, so you will see both years on secondhand copies.
5. Frill Kill (2007). A week before Halloween, Carmela’s friend Ava throws a party at her voodoo shop with a tarot reader working the room. Walking home afterwards, Carmela finds a model’s body behind a dumpster and is attacked herself — and the marks on the victim are not the kind a person leaves.
6. Death Swatch (2008). Mardi Gras, a balcony, and float designer Archie Baudier strangled with a garrote of barbed wire. The theories flying around the Quarter range from a mob hit to a feud between rival float builders, while Carmela works on the quieter details: gold paint on the dead man’s shoes, a ransacked flat, a single gold doubloon. Detective Edgar Babcock arrives in this one and stays.
7. Tragic Magic (2009). Carmela is hired to design the sets for Medusa Manor, a grand old mansion being turned into a haunted-house attraction for tourists. The project is barely underway when a burning body is thrown from the third-floor tower, which is more atmosphere than anybody ordered.
8. Fiber & Brimstone (2010). Carmela and Ava build giant puppets for the Monsters and Mayhem parade, and the screams they hear on parade night are not part of the show: the captain of the float den has been killed by the horns of an enormous Minotaur head. The craft detail in this one is unusually good fun.
9. Skeleton Letters (2011). A member of Carmela’s scrapbooking circle is killed inside St. Tristan’s Church and an antique crucifix vanishes with a hooded figure. The church is a tourist stop open to anyone who walks in, which gives the police almost nothing and gives Carmela a suspect list that stretches from an odd monk to a cult calling itself The Seekers.
10. Postcards from the Dead (2012). KBEZ-TV news anchor Kimber Breeze is strangled and left hanging from a hotel balcony during a Mardi Gras parade, minutes before Carmela was due to be interviewed by her. Then the postcards start arriving, signed by Kimber.
11. Gilt Trip (2013). A Louisiana businessman is released early from prison, his wife throws him a Get Out of Jail Free party, and sometime between the drinks and the zydeco band the guest of honour is murdered — his body stuffed into a clothes dryer. The widow more or less conscripts Carmela, and a second death follows.
12. Gossamer Ghost (2014). Halloween night: the owner of Oddities Antiques tumbles dead out of a curio cabinet and a Napoleon death mask is missing. Carmela and Ava chase it through shuffling zombies, a fake French countess and a ghost train, and the book ends with scrapbook tips and recipes, as several in the series do.
13. Parchment and Old Lace (2015). A bride-to-be is strangled with vintage lace in Lafayette Cemetery, and the scrap of parchment left behind looks like something off a collage table rather than a murder scene. This is the first book credited to Laura Childs with Terrie Farley Moran, a partnership that runs to the end of the series.
14. Crepe Factor (2016). Candlelight concerts and the Winter Market have the Quarter at its most festive when a restaurant critic who writes for a webzine called Glutton for Punishment is stabbed with a serving fork. The restaurateur last seen arguing with him is the obvious suspect, which is usually Carmela’s cue to doubt it.
15. Glitter Bomb (2018). A Mardi Gras float explodes and kills a member of the krewe, and suspicion lands on Carmela’s ex-husband. Beads down, detective hats on.
16. Mumbo Gumbo Murder (2019). Jazz Fest, giant puppets in the street, and a crash from Devon Dowling’s antiques shop: the dealer is dead of an ice-pick wound with only his little dog Mimi as a witness. Carmela runs her own quiet investigation alongside the official one, and so far this is where the series stops.

Where to start with the Scrapbooking Mysteries

Start at the beginning. Keepsake Crimes introduces Memory Mine, Carmela’s collapsing marriage to Shamus and her friendship with Ava, and all three of those run as continuing threads through the whole series — particularly the romance, which goes somewhere specific once Detective Edgar Babcock turns up in book six. Every murder is set up and solved inside its own book, so you will not be stranded if you read one out of sequence; you will simply know things about Carmela’s private life that the earlier books were still working towards.

If you would rather pick by occasion, the series makes that easy, because Childs builds most books around a New Orleans event. For Halloween, try Frill Kill, Tragic Magic, Fiber & Brimstone or Gossamer Ghost; for Mardi Gras, Keepsake Crimes, Death Swatch, Postcards from the Dead or Glitter Bomb; for the Christmas-market end of the year, Crepe Factor. We have fuller seasonal lists of Halloween cozy mysteries and Christmas cozy mysteries if you are reading to a calendar.

Several of the books close with craft tips and recipes — Photo Finished includes scrapbooking tips, and Gossamer Ghost adds seafood bisque, spoon bread and beignets — which puts the series squarely among the cozy mysteries with recipes. Not every volume has them, so treat it as a bonus rather than a promise.

Laura Childs’s other series

Scrapbooking is the middle of three cozy series. The Tea Shop Mysteries are the big one — Theodosia Browning and the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, now past thirty books, and the series Childs is actively writing: her news page names Buttermint Bomb for March 2027, with Cardamom Crimes and Haunting in a Teacup behind it. Our Tea Shop Mysteries reading order has the full list.

The Cackleberry Club Mysteries are the quietest of the three: nine books about three widowed friends running a cafe in small-town Kindred, beginning with Eggs in Purgatory. Childs also writes thrillers under the name Afton Tangler, which are not cozy in any sense and should not be handed to a reader who came for the beignets.

Frequently asked questions

Do you have to read the Scrapbooking Mysteries in order?

No, but it is the better way. Each mystery is self-contained, so any of the sixteen can be read alone. What carries over is everything else: Carmela’s marriage, her shop’s finances, Ava’s love life, and the slow arrival of Edgar Babcock. Reading in publication order means those land in the right sequence rather than arriving pre-spoiled.

How many Scrapbooking Mysteries are there?

Sixteen novels, 2003 to 2019. Both Laura Childs’s own site and Penguin Random House list exactly sixteen. Retailer counts sometimes look higher because large-print, audio and omnibus editions get shelved as separate entries.

Is Death By Design the fourth Scrapbooking Mystery?

No — and this is the one thing in the series that genuinely trips people up. Death By Design (Berkley, 2006) is a 480-page three-in-one omnibus of the first three novels, Keepsake Crimes, Photo Finished and Bound for Murder. Penguin Random House files it in the series numbering, which makes it look like a fourth instalment. It is good value if you are starting out, but it is not new material, and the actual book four is Motif for Murder.

Who is Terrie Farley Moran, and did the series change when she joined?

Terrie Farley Moran is a cozy author in her own right, and from Parchment and Old Lace (2015) the covers read “Laura Childs with Terrie Farley Moran” — a collaboration credit Berkley carried through the last four books. The setting, the cast and Carmela’s voice stay put; if anything the plots tighten slightly. Readers who notice a difference usually only notice it after being told there is one.

Will there be a seventeenth Scrapbooking Mystery?

Nothing has been announced. Mumbo Gumbo Murder came out in 2019, and as of October 2026 Childs’s own news page lists three forthcoming Tea Shop Mysteries and a third Afton Tangler thriller, with no mention of Carmela. Berkley has not declared the series finished either, so the fair description is dormant rather than closed — and sixteen books is a complete run by any reasonable standard.

More reading orders like this one live on our cozy mystery series in order hub, and if you are new to the genre our guide for beginners is a gentler door in. For a new series put in order every week — plus a standing argument about which fictional shop we would most like to spend an afternoon in — come and join us at The Teacup Sleuth on Facebook. Tell us there: which New Orleans book hooked you first?