Molly Cates series by Mary Willis Walker

The Author

Mary Willis Walker (born May 24, 1942, Fox Point, Wisconsin) is an American crime fiction author.

Walker graduated from Duke University in English and took up high school teaching. She married in 1967 to Lee Walker who became president of Dell Computers, living in New York and Virginia before moving to Austin, Texas. They have two daughters, Amanda and Susannah but are now divorced. She continues to live in Austin.

She began writing in her mid-forties, which she characterized as " 'pretty late to start' ". She spent two years writing her first published thriller, Zero at the Bone, which was published in 1991. Her second Texas-based mystery, Red Scream, was Walker's first to feature sleuth Molly Cates. Red Scream won the Best Mystery Edgar Award in 1993. Under the Beetle's Cellar, published in 1995, was Walker's third mystery.

The Books

Molly Cates, a true-crime writer and reporter in Austin, Texas:

Texas-based crime reporter Molly Cates has just published her first book, describing the blood-curdling exploits of serial killer Louie Bronk. Now on death row, Louie's sentence is about to be carried out. Molly will be there as a witness, and she wants to write about it—the final coda to Louie's story. But suddenly, she's being strongly discouraged by her boss at the Lone Star Monthly and by Charlie McFarland, the millionaire real estate developer whose first wife, Tiny, was Bronk's most famous victim—and the only one whose murder is a capital offense. Then Molly starts to receive dark hints that Louie may not have killed Tiny after all. There is another murder following Louis's M.O.—one he could not have committed. The veracity of Molly's book is threatened—and then her very life. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Molly realizes that by attempting to save Louis she is putting her own life on the line, and discrediting her own work. Mary Willis...

The books in suggested reading order
The Red Scream
Under the Beetle's Cellar
All the Dead Lie Down