Iza Moreau Books In Order

Publication Order of Elodie Fontaine Mysteries Books

Chronological Order of Elodie Fontaine Mysteries Books

Publication Order of Small Town Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Iza Moreau has been a journalist, a teacher, an editor, and a horse trainer. Born in New Mexico, where her parents had a ranch, she learned to ride at a young age. After a degree in English Literature at the University of New Mexico, she traveled to the Big Apple to take journalism classes at Columbia, where she served as co-editor of a local literary magazine.

After a stint as an embedded reporter in Baghdad, Iza returned to the U. S and migrated to the Deep South, where she bought a small farm in North Florida and taught journalism part time at Florida State University and Florida A&M University. It is there that she began her Small Town Series of lesbian mystery novels. Her Elodie Fontaine Mysteries are set in Tallahassee.

After retiring from teaching, she moved to the U.K. with her partner where she continues to enjoy her life. Her literary novel, London, Falling, is set in London and her fantasy novel, Persephone’s Mare, bridges her two worlds, beginning in North Florida and ending up in an alternative England. Most of her books draw on her life with horses and her love of archery and Young Adult fiction.

The Small Town Series

War reporter Sue-Ann McKeown, after a six-month assignment in the Green Zone in Iraq during 2008, returns home to the small town of Pine Oak, Florida. Her mother has just died in a freak riding accident and her father has absconded to Italy with money he attained by selling his wife’s horses and other items. Sue-Ann is kind of a mess. She’s suffering from an undiagnosed PTSD as well as a potentially fatal illness that keeps her tired and listless. She has broken up with her boyfriend of several years and taken a reporter’s job with the twice-a-week Pine Oak Courier, where her old high school rival is the office manager. The series features a lesbian protagonist.

Book 1: The News in Small Towns (2013)

With the help of her old / new friend Gina, old high school classmate Clarence Meekins, and a weird old geezer who runs the town’s only bookstore, Sue-Ann McKeown delves into several mysterious happenings that pop up in her small town of Pine Oak. First a sacrificial goat is found near Clarence’s dumpster. Then Sue-Ann’s house is broken into and vandalized. Finally she finds the remains of a chicken near an occult, corn-starch drawing in the woods. Sue-Ann fears that these seemingly random acts are leading up to something deadly—and she has to find out who is doing them before someone is hurt. And amid it all, she has to find out the meaning of the impetuous kiss that Gina had given her after one of their talks.

Book 2: Madness in Small Towns (2013)

A crazy man shoots at Sue-Ann with a crossbow after threatening to kill and burn his mother. After he is hospitalized, Sue-Ann sets off on a journey that has several purposes. First, she has promised her new friend Ashley Torrington, that she will try to find the woman he was in love with before he was sent to Vietnam, where he was burned with Napalm. She also has to settle things with her old boyfriend, who wants her to come back to him. And then she must search for Gina Cartwright, who has disappeared after confessing her love for Sue-Ann. Trouble is, Gina’s ex-boyfriend—Pine Oak Courier editor Cal Dent (who is unaware of Gina’s and Sue-Ann’s relationship)—also wants Sue-Ann to find her. But when she gets back to Pine Oak, she finds that her crossbow-shooting enemy has escaped from the nearby mental hospital and is searching for her.

Book 3: Secrets in Small Towns (2014)

Sue-Ann and Gina have become a couple—but a very discreet one due to the almost total homophobia rampant in the small town of Pine Oak. When Sue-Ann discovers a teenage boy passed out on her property, she becomes drawn into a decades-long mystery featuring a halfway house for boys, hidden graves, a history of child abuse, and the use of bath salts as the new rural drug of choice. Having succeeded Cal Dent as the editor the Pine Oak Courier, Sue-Ann has the option of which of these stories to cover and she chooses them all. And through it all, another of her high-school classmates, Joe Bickley, now a police officer, is determined to out Sue-Ann and Gina as lesbians. But Sue-Ann has weapons of her own . . .

Book 4: Mysteries in Small Towns (2015)

The final volume of the Small Town Series is a series of short (and one not-so-short) stories featuring Sue-Ann McKeown and her girlfriend Gina. Each of these stories takes place after the original three novels. In the first of these, Sue-Ann locates a woman who has absconded not only with the money she has embezzled from her business, but also with the heart of the woman who loves her. Other stories take the two friends to New York, where Sue-Ann is mysteriously attacked by someone who seems to know her itinerary. Another takes her to a horse show, where she discovers evidence of animal abuse. “Indian Summer” is a novella describing Sue-Ann’s trip to Crow Fair in Montana to find a missing Native-American girl. “Archer’s Paradox” enables Sue-Ann to solve her only murder case and “Ghosts” wraps up the series, giving insight into how most of the characters in the series ended up.

The Elodie Fontaine Mysteries

Elodie Fontaine was born in China and for her first seven years, was part of her American mother’s experiment to see if children could learn computer code as a first or second language. When her mother died—her experiment not quite complete—Elodie was adopted by lesbian parents and brought to Tallahassee, Florida, where she attends Tallahassee High School. She is simply a normal 17-year-old student who is on the tennis team, attends Math and Science Club meetings, and begins to have crushes on other girls. Along with her friends Margo and Kelli, she investigates crimes both within and outside of school.

These mystery novels make up the only Nancy Drew style series featuring a lesbian sleuth. Elodie’s mothers are introduced in Moreau’s earlier literary novel, The 5.

Book 1: Tank Baby (2019)

Elodie gets mysterious email notes written both in Chinese and Binary. Some of her friends are threatened and she and her new girlfriend are threatened by Asian thugs in the employ of the Chinese government. They seem to involve papers concerning her late mother’s psychology experiments a decade earlier—documents that Elodie has only recently come into possession of. Elodie’s birth mother died before the experiment was finished. So why would anyone want them?

Book 2: Ghost in the Piano (2019)

Elodie locates her late mother’s family in New Orleans. But when she and her friends travel there to meet them, odd things start to happen. Voodoo dolls of both Elodie and her friend Margo show up on her grandparents’ doorstep, her friend Tiffany is attacked in a park, and a fake cleaning woman seems to be casing the house for reasons unknown. Meanwhile, Elodie is hot on the trail of a valuable collection of original sheet music written by her great grandfather and hidden by him for reasons unknown.

Book 3: Horses Wild (2019)

Elodie and her friends go undercover to determine who is sabotaging a horse-training facility owned by an associate of her mothers. At first, it was just theft—cash out of a register, bales of hay, bags of feed, and a couple of specialty horse bits. But things get serious when a valuable saddle is shredded by a knife and Elodie is almost killed when the tack used on a schooling horse she is riding is sabotaged. Who is doing it and why?

Book 4: Desert Girl (2020)

After joining a DNA matching site, Elodie and her mother Sandra fly to Southern California to search for her birth father, a Mexican / American who went missing a decade earlier. Along with her half-sister Layna, Elodie becomes involved in an adventure involving petroglyphs that are hundreds of years old, bizarre, off-the-grid cities, and the specter of ICE agents dogging her newfound family.

Book 5: Billy’s Legacy (2024)

One of Elodie’s half-sisters shows up unexpected in Tallahassee. She has come into possession of a valuable piece of Mexican pottery, but someone has followed her and will go to any lengths to get it. At school, an old friend shows up with a new look and a new name and a desire to graduate with his year. But bullying might cancel his plans. And what is the mysterious legacy that her Mexican grandfather hinted at just before his death?

Book 6: Stormy Weather (2023)

When one of her mothers is trapped by hurricane debris while at a writers retreat, Elodie and her friends travel there to dig her out. Unfortunately, Elodie finds the skeleton of Birdie—one of her mother’s old friends who has been missing for 20 years. With all the suspects in place, Elodie must find out who killed Birdie before everyone leaves the retreat. Meanwhile, a girl she has just met is being blackmailed by someone who has racy pictures she has taken of herself and has threatened to publish online unless he gets paid. Can Elodie find the murderer and the blackmailer? This book ties up and finishes the Elodie Fontaine Mystery series.

Note: Book 6 was published in 2023 while Book 5 will be published in January 2024. It happens.

(Thanks to P.V. LeForge for this excellent bio!)