Maine Clambake Mysteries in Order: All 12 Books (Barbara Ross)

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Every summer a wooden boat leaves a Maine harbor loaded with tourists, runs out to a private island, and delivers them to a fire pit full of seaweed and hot rocks where clams and lobster steam under canvas. That is the Snowden Family Clambake, and twelve books in it has survived storms, a thin bank balance, a sealed room, a stolen necklace and an improbable number of murders. Barbara Ross has been writing it since 2013, and the series has become one of the most reliably satisfying things on the cozy shelf: salt air, real food, and a heroine who is usually too busy to be sleuthing.

This is the complete Maine Clambake Mystery reading order — all 12 novels with their years, where the six holiday novellas fit, where to start, and what Barbara Ross has written besides. Spoiler-free throughout.

Maine Clambake Mysteries in Order: All 12 Novels

Years below are the publication dates listed by Kensington, the series publisher. One warning about the numbers: Kensington released several of these books in the last week of December, so library catalogs and retailers sometimes date them to the following January. Stowed Away is the usual casualty — you will see it listed as both 2017 and 2018, and both are defensible. It also means 2016 carries two books and 2020 carries none.

1. Clammed Up (2013). Julia Snowden comes home to rescue her family’s struggling clambake business, and the first wedding of the season ends with the best man dead on the staircase of the Morrow Island mansion. Suspicion settles fast on Chris Durand, the boy she had a crush on in high school — and the pattern for the whole series is set: a summer crowd, a small town, and a business that cannot afford a scandal.
2. Boiled Over (2014). The town’s summer Founder’s Day celebration is barely underway when the owner of the local RV park is murdered and Julia’s new hire, Cabe Stone, is blamed. Julia has a festival to feed and an employee to clear, in roughly that order.
3. Musseled Out (2015). Late summer, the tourist season thinning out, and a seafood restaurant mogul named David Thwing turns up dead beneath a lobsterman’s boat. The police like Julia’s brother-in-law Sonny for it, and Julia — who argues with Sonny constantly — is certain they have the wrong man.
4. Fogged Inn (2016). November fog, an emptied-out off-season town, and an unidentified body in the walk-in refrigerator of the restaurant below Julia’s apartment. The dead man ate at the bar the night before and nobody will admit to knowing him; the answer runs back to a tragedy among a group of local retirees decades earlier. The best book in the series for readers who like their cozies cold and quiet.
5. Iced Under (2016). A package arrives with no note and a long-lost family necklace inside, and Julia and her mother Jacqueline spend a snowbound Maine winter untangling what became of a cousin who vanished decades ago. This is the family-history book, and it explains a good deal about where the Snowdens came from.
6. Stowed Away (2017). Early summer, the clambake not yet open for the season, and a dinner invitation aboard a wealthy stranger’s yacht ends with the host dead. Suspicion lands on Wyatt Jayne, Julia’s old prep school rival, which makes the whole investigation more personal than Julia would like.
7. Steamed Open (2018). A newcomer named Bartholomew Frick closes off the beach the clambake digs its clams from, which is enough to make half the town furious — and then he is stabbed with a clam rake, with Julia the last person known to have seen him alive. A sharp little book about how coastal towns really argue: access, property and who was here first.
8. Sealed Off (2019). Early October, and the renovation of the Morrow Island mansion opens a room that has been sealed for years. A member of the work crew dies, a second body follows, and Julia has to look hard at people she has known most of her life.
9. Shucked Apart (2021). An oyster farmer named Andie Greatorex has thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of oyster seed stolen and asks Julia for help; not long after, she is found dead by her own dock. It goes deep into Maine aquaculture, and it is far more gripping than that description suggests.
10. Muddled Through (2022). Mud season in Busman’s Harbor, and the town is tearing itself apart over a plan to close part of a street to cars. A break-in at Zoey Butterfield’s pottery shop turns into murder, and Julia’s sister Livvie, a potter herself, is caught in the middle of it.
11. Hidden Beneath (2023). Five years ago Jacqueline’s friend Ginny disappeared during a harbor swim; now she has been declared dead, and the memorial service held for her on Chipmunk Island sits badly with everyone who attends. Old summer-colony money, older friendships and a fresh killing make this the most atmospheric of the later books.
12. Torn Asunder (2024). Julia is running her best friend Zoey’s wedding and a clambake on Morrow Island when an uninvited guest dies, apparently from an injection, and a storm strands the entire party on the island with the body. A proper closed-circle mystery, and a neat echo of where the series began.

The six Maine Clambake novellas

Alongside the novels, Ross has written six novellas for Kensington’s holiday anthologies, sharing each volume with other cozy authors including Leslie Meier. In series order they sit at 4.5, 6.5, 7.5, 9.5, 10.5 and 11.5, and they appeared in Eggnog Murder, Yule Log Murder, Haunted House Murder, Halloween Party Murder, Irish Coffee Murder and Easter Basket Murder.

Four of them have since been released on their own as short ebooks — Nogged Off, Logged On, Hallowed Out and Scared Off — which is the cheaper way to read them if you do not want three novellas by three different authors in one book. None of them is essential. They are holiday treats, and they do what novellas in a long cozy series do best: give the supporting cast a day out.

Where to start

Start at the beginning. Clammed Up is short, it does the introductions properly, and the whole premise of the series — a woman who came home to save a business she is not sure she wants — only pays off if you watch it from the start. The books are quick, and most readers are at book four before they have consciously decided to commit.

If you would rather sample one first, pick by weather. Fogged Inn (book 4) is the off-season book: November, fog, an empty town, and the closest this series comes to a locked-room puzzle. Hidden Beneath (book 11) is the summer one, all boats and old money. Neither gives away much of what comes before.

And a practical note: every book and novella ends with recipes, most of them developed by Ross’s husband, Bill Carito. If that is what you are here for, our list of cozy mysteries with recipes included has nine more series in the same vein, and the Goldy Schulz reading order is the obvious next stop for caterer-sleuth fans.

Barbara Ross’s other books

Two more series sit beside the clambakes. The Jane Darrowfield Mysteries follow a retired Massachusetts woman who solves other people’s problems for a living: Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody and Jane Darrowfield and the Madwoman Next Door. The Chief Ruth Murphy Mysteries open with The Death of an Ambitious Woman, which is a harder-edged police novel than anything in Busman’s Harbor. Ross also edited the Maine crime anthology series Best New England Crime Stories for several years.

Frequently asked questions

Do you have to read the Maine Clambake Mysteries in order?

Each murder is self-contained, so you can technically start anywhere. But Julia’s life is a continuing story — the state of the business, her mother’s house, her sister’s family, who she is with and who she is not — and reading out of sequence spoils developments that the books take their time over. Publication order is the right order.

How many Maine Clambake books are there?

Twelve novels and six novellas. Ross herself gave those numbers in a Maine television interview in May 2025, which matches the list on her own website. Retailers that shelve the anthologies as full-length books will show you a higher count.

Will there be another Maine Clambake mystery?

Torn Asunder (April 2024) is the most recent novel, and no thirteenth book has been announced by Kensington or by Ross as of October 2026. The series has not been declared finished either, so the honest answer is that it is quiet rather than closed.

Is Busman’s Harbor a real place?

No. Ross has said the town is based on Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and that the Snowden Family Clambake is loosely modeled on the real Cabbage Island Clambake, which has been steaming clams for visitors off the Boothbay coast for decades. The boat ride, the fire pit and the canvas are the genuine article; the murders are not.

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 the place to start. For a new series put in order every week — plus the occasional argument about lobster rolls — come and join us at The Teacup Sleuth on Facebook. Tell us there: which Maine Clambake book would you hand a first-time reader?

Sources

For reading order and publication years on this page our source of record is Barbara Ross’s own Maine Clambake Mysteries page. We checked the newest entries on this page against it on 27 October 2026. Books that are announced but have no confirmed release date are marked as such rather than given a year. We also cross-check her list of the Clambake novellas. If anything here is out of date, tell us in the comments and we will fix it.