Diane Mott Davidson

Diane Mott Davidson is an American author who helped popularize the culinary cozy mystery subgenre with her long-running Goldy Bear/Goldy Schulz series, following a Colorado caterer who solves murders in and around her small mountain-town community, often connected to her catering jobs. Beginning with Catering to Nobody in 1990, the series spans eighteen novels and is notable for embedding real, tested recipes at the end of each book, a format that became widely imitated across the culinary mystery genre that followed.

Davidson's books combine light amateur-detective plotting with detailed, appealing food writing and a recurring cast built around Goldy's small business, her second husband (a homicide detective), and her extended found family in the fictional town of Aspen Meadow, Colorado. The series is prized by fans of the genre for the warmth of its community setting as much as for its mysteries. New readers should start with Catering to Nobody, since Goldy's family situation, including her recovery from an abusive first marriage, develops across the earliest books. No film or television adaptation of the series has been produced. The most recent entry, Crunch Time, was published in 2013, and no new installment has followed since; current details of Davidson's activity are not well documented in public sources.