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Three women in their forties, all of them widowed, buy a disused railway spur station outside a small town called Kindred and turn it into a cafe. They serve omelets, toad in the hole and something called a slumbering volcano, they put a book nook and a knitting nest in the back, and then they start finding bodies. That is the Cackleberry Club, the smallest and the warmest of Laura Childs’s three cozy series, and the one her readers are most likely to have missed.
This is the complete Cackleberry Club reading order: all nine books with their first-publication years, a spoiler-free line or two on each, where to start, why the run has so many gaps in it, and whether a tenth book is coming.
Quick answer: There are 9 Cackleberry Club Mysteries, all published by Berkley between 2008 and 2021. Start with Eggs in Purgatory (2008) and read in publication order. The most recent is Egg Shooters (January 2021), and as of October 2026 no tenth book has been announced — Childs’s own news page lists three new Tea Shop Mysteries and a thriller in progress instead.
Cackleberry Club Mysteries in Order: All 9 Books
The titles and numbering below match Laura Childs’s own series page and Penguin Random House’s listing, which both stop at nine and agree on the order. Every year given here is checked against a Penguin Random House edition date for that book. All nine are Berkley.
- Eggs in Purgatory (2008). Suzanne, Toni and Petra have each lost a husband, and the Cackleberry Club is what they do next: a breakfast cafe in a rehabbed spur station on the edge of Kindred, with a book nook and a knitting nest tucked in behind the counter. Business is good until a lawyer is found dead in his car out back, and the questions that follow lead straight into a scandal from Suzanne’s late husband’s life — by way of a frightened girl who has run away from a cult.
- Eggs Benedict Arnold (2009). Ozzie Driesden, the town mortician, ends up on his own slab. It is a small place and the three of them know everyone, which is the problem: as the list of suspects fills up, the names on it are people who eat breakfast at the Cackleberry Club every week.
- Bedeviled Eggs (2010). Kindred is decorating for Halloween, a mayoral candidate is shot with a crossbow as he leaves the cafe, and two days later a second body turns up on the historical society’s Quilt Trail. A good one to read in late October alongside our other Halloween cozy mysteries.
- Stake & Eggs (2012). A killing in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, right as the town is putting on its Fire and Ice Festival. The weather does a great deal of the work in this one, and Kindred is properly rattled rather than merely intrigued.
- Eggs in a Casket (2014). Suzanne and Toni drive out to the cemetery to deliver flowers and find an open grave with one of Kindred’s most prominent citizens crumpled in it. Nobody buried him, nobody mourned him, and the women work out fairly quickly what that has to mean.
- Scorched Eggs (2014). Suzanne is in the hair salon when the County Services office next door goes up in flames, taking with it a long-serving clerk who was a fixture at the cafe. Investigators find traces of an accelerant, so the fire was set — and the trail points towards something somebody badly wanted burned.
- Egg Drop Dead (2016). Suzanne drives out to a dairy farm to collect wheels of cheese, finds nobody about, steps into the barn and is met by a row of cows that have not been milked. The farmer was the mildest man in the county, which is exactly what makes his death so hard to explain. Berkley prints “recipes included” on this one.
- Eggs on Ice (2018). The Kindred Players are staging A Christmas Carol and their Scrooge — a thoroughly disliked local attorney — is stabbed during the first dress rehearsal. Suzanne chases the killer out of the building and loses him in the alley. The Christmas entry in the series, and a natural companion to our Christmas cozy mysteries list.
- Egg Shooters (2021). A shooting at the hospital, a robbery at the pharmacy and several strangers in town who nobody can place. The most recent book in the series, published in January 2021.
Where to start
Start at the beginning, with Eggs in Purgatory. It is a short book and it does the one job later entries cannot: it shows you three strangers-in-grief deciding to open a cafe together, which is the whole emotional engine of the series. Come in at book five and the Cackleberry Club is simply a nice place where murders happen nearby.
If you would rather sample the series by mood, Bedeviled Eggs is the Halloween one, Stake & Eggs the deep-winter one and Eggs on Ice the Christmas one. Each mystery closes inside its own covers, so none of those will leave you stranded.
What the series is actually like
Three things set the Cackleberry Club apart from the rest of the cafe-and-bakery shelf. The first is the age of its heroines: Suzanne, Toni and Petra are over forty and widowed, and the books treat that as a beginning rather than a sad backstory. The second is the setting, which is rural Midwest rather than picturesque coastal — church suppers, a county sheriff, a quilt trail, a festival for every season.
The third is the food, which is specific enough to be half the pleasure. The cafe’s menu runs to fluffy omelets, egg strata, toad in the hole and eggs on a cloud, Petra does the baking, and most of the books close with recipes; reviewers have been calling them “toothsome” since the first one. If that is what you are here for, our round-up of cozy mysteries with recipes and our bakery cozy mysteries list cover the same ground.
Why the run has so many gaps
Nine books across thirteen years is an unusual shape for a cozy series, and the gaps are real rather than an artefact of bad listings. Books one to three arrived in consecutive Decembers, 2008 to 2010. Then nothing in 2011; Stake & Eggs in late 2012; nothing in 2013; two books in 2014 (Eggs in a Casket in January, Scorched Eggs in December); then 2016, 2018 and 2021.
The simple explanation is that Laura Childs has been writing the Tea Shop Mysteries at roughly two a year the whole time, and the Cackleberry Club has always been the series that fits in the spaces. One practical consequence for buyers: several of these titles appeared first as a hardcover or ebook in December and as a mass-market paperback a year later, so a copy can honestly be labelled with either year. Where that happens, the year above is the first one.
Laura Childs’s other series
The Tea Shop Mysteries are the flagship: Theodosia Browning and the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston, past thirty books and still going, with Buttermint Bomb due in March 2027 and two more named on the author’s news page. The Scrapbook Mysteries are the New Orleans set — sixteen books about Carmela Bertrand and her French Quarter shop, which ended, or paused, in 2019. Childs also writes thrillers as Afton Tangler, and those are not cozy in any sense.
Frequently asked questions
How many Cackleberry Club Mysteries are there?
Nine novels, published between 2008 and 2021. Laura Childs’s own site and Penguin Random House both list exactly nine, and Penguin Random House labels each book page “Book N of 9”. Retailer counts occasionally look higher because large-print and audio editions get shelved as separate entries.
Do you have to read the Cackleberry Club Mysteries in order?
No. Every mystery is solved inside its own book, so any of the nine works as a standalone. What accumulates is everything around the murders: the cafe’s finances, Toni’s tangled marriage, Suzanne’s slow return to a life she did not plan on. Publication order lets those arrive in the right sequence instead of being spoiled in passing.
Is there a tenth Cackleberry Club book?
Not announced. Egg Shooters came out in January 2021, and as of October 2026 the author’s own news page lists three forthcoming Tea Shop Mysteries and a third Afton Tangler thriller, with no mention of Kindred. Berkley has not declared the series finished either, so the honest description is dormant rather than closed.
Do the books include recipes?
Most of them do, at the back, and they are the kind you would actually cook for a weekend breakfast. Berkley put “recipes included” on the cover copy for Egg Drop Dead, and reviewers have mentioned the recipes in most of the others. It is not a cast-iron promise for every volume, so treat it as a bonus.
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 cafe we would most like to have breakfast in — come and join us at The Teacup Sleuth on Facebook. Tell us there: which of the three Cackleberry Club women would you want running your local?