Patricia Sprinkle Books In Order

Publication Order of Family Tree Books

Publication Order of Job's Corner Chronicles Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Sheila Travis Books

Publication Order of Thoroughly Southern Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Patricia Sprinkle
When Patricia Sprinkle met and married her husband Bob, he looked over their budget and demanded that she write a mystery in order to pay for all the ones that she buys? She knew right then she wanted to put a body in a building where she used to work.

But being over-endowed with the Protestant ethic, she wrote more “important” things first and just wrote the mystery in her spare time, so her first mystery, called “Murder at Markham”, took her thirteen years to finish. And it took Patricia even longer for her to learn that any writing that gives her pleasure is important, whether it’s non fiction or fiction.

Since 1988, she has been writing mysteries and non fiction. Bob’s concluded that writing is not her profession, but her obsession. Especially since her favorite vacation is to go somewhere where somebody else fixes her meals and where she is able to write more than she does back home, without any interruptions.

Her mysteries are written in the tradition of Nagaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, or Patricia Wentworth, and are strong in plot as well as character, with all of the clues that you need in order to solve them.

She loves sweet tea, strong women, warm beaches, Coca Cola, and mild winters. She also loves kids and helping make this a better world for them.

Patricia is a frequent speaker at women’s conferences and seminars. She is an active member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime.

“When Did We Lose Harriet?” is the first novel in the “Thoroughly Southern Mystery” series and was released in 1997. This teen girl has been missing from her Montgomery, Alabama, home for six weeks now. She might be a crime victim, a runaway, or both. What is amazing is other people’s absolute lack of concern. Only one person cares that she has gone: this spunky amateur sleuth on the sunset end of sixty.

MacLaren Yarbrough (armed with a salty wit, razor sharp insight, and tenacious faith) follows this trail of clues (a shadow of a lie, a wisp of a hint) to find answers to questions which come fast and hot and which grow increasingly alarming. How could a fifteen year old girl come across such a large sum of money? Why would she hide it rather than take it with her? Where could she be now? And who’s willing to murder in order to keep MacLaren from probing too deep? Masked by honeysuckle scent and Dixie charm, this deadly secret lies coiled, one which holds the ultimate answer to the question, When Did We Lose Harriet?

“But Why Shoot the Magistrate” is the second novel in the “Thoroughly Southern Mystery” series and was released in 1998. MacLaren Yarbrough, after a popular youth pastor gets accused of a grisly crime, will not rest until she can find the truth. Her gut instinct is telling her that Luke Blessed is innocent. Still, how could the dream that he had the same night a young woman got murdered depict the crime with such chilling accuracy?

While MacLaren is tracking the clues down from all corners of Hopewell, GA, four like suspects have emerged. However the cops are not buying any of her theories. Even her husband, Joe Riddley (the local magistrate) resists her amateur sleuthing. This case, he believes, is far too dangerous. Exactly how dangerous, well the two of them are soon going to find that out.

The assailant strikes yet again, leaving Joe comatose from a gunshot wound to his head. All of a sudden, this new question stares her right in the face. It is the most perplexing question of all, and the most personal: Why shoot the magistrate?

“The Remember Box” is the first novel in the “Job’s Corner Chronicles” series and was released in 2000. Summer in Job’s Corner meant cool grass, big trees, and sweltering afternoons stretching endlessly under the Southern sun. These are the days without air conditioning, microwaves, plastic, or television, a time when clocks tick by comfortingly in the night and a cool breeze was a gift. However while the long sultry summer of 1949 comes to a close, events are going to transform this sleepy little Southern crossroads.

Carley Marshall (eleven years old) lost her mom to polio, and comes to Job’s Corner in order to make a new start, along with Uncle Stephen and Aunt Kate Whitfield and her cousins John and Abby. The family is warmly welcomed by this small North Carolina community while Stephen takes the post of pastor to Bethel Church, this Presbyterian congregation. However their welcome starts to wear thin and covert criticism runs rampant while Stephen challenges age-old traditions and beliefs.

While Job’s Corner faces national struggles for coal strikes, civil rights, and hysteria over Communism, Stephen’s voice of reason gets lost in the growing hostility of a vocal minority. Though this quintessential Southern community appears to be filled with people that are the salt of the earth, lies and secrets are hidden under the easy going surface. And the truth has to be revealed before one innocent man gets convicted of murder.

With the new decade dawning, Carley learns to face her own family secrets. And learns that we all have to make the journey to truth alone.

“Death on the Family Tree” is the first novel in the “Family Tree Mystery” series and was released in 2006. Katharine Murray, with a husband always on the road and grown up kids, would find her nest empty if it weren’t for her Aunt Lucy, until the elderly woman dies. Now Katharine is saddled with her Aunt’s worldly possessions, primarily knickknacks destined for a dumpster. However there is this priceless Celtic necklace among the dross, and this diary written in German, neither of which Katharine has ever seen before.

Determined to figure out where these objects came from, Katharine unwittingly finds a branch of her family tree that she never even knew existed, including a brother of Aunt Lucy’s named Carter, murdered over fifty years ago after this mysterious trip to Austria. When Lucy’s artifacts get stolen, and the prime suspect winds up dead, Katharine realizes that she and she alone has to solve two unsolved homicides and a burglary separated by a half-century, before more than just her family secrets wind up dead and buried.