Emma Graham Series Books in Order

The Emma Graham Series by Martha Grimes follows twelve-year-old Emma Graham, a precocious, bookish, and stubbornly observant child growing up in the small Maryland town of La Porte in the 1950s. When murders and mysteries disturb her quiet community, Emma finds herself investigating alongside — and occasionally ahead of — the adults who underestimate her.

Grimes — best known for her Richard Jury mysteries — brings her characteristic intelligence and atmospheric writing to these YA-adjacent novels, but Emma Graham is a distinctly literary creation: a child narrator whose voice is wry, precise, and haunted by the adult world she is on the edge of understanding. These are not conventional cozy mysteries; they are character studies that happen to contain mysteries.

The series began in 2003 and attracted readers of serious literary fiction alongside mystery fans, praised for the quality of Grimes's prose and the authenticity of her period rendering. La Porte in the 1950s feels genuinely lived-in, and Emma's perspective on its social dynamics is both funny and unexpectedly moving.

Read the Emma Graham books in order for the best experience of Emma's developing voice and the accumulating portrait of La Porte. Begin with Hotel Paradise. Readers who appreciate Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird or Donna Tartt's novelistic ambition will find Grimes' Emma Graham series uncommonly rewarding.