Gunnie Rose

About the Gunnie Rose series

Lizbeth Rose is a gunnie — a hired gun for travelers who can't afford to cross dangerous territory alone — in an alternate 1930s America that fractured after a fictional assassination of Franklin D. Roosevelt splintered the country into rival nations: Texas remains its own republic, the old Confederacy hangs on as Dixie, and a magic-wielding Russian community has fled the revolution to settle in the fractured West, bringing grigoris (wizards) and the political intrigue of Tsarist succession with them. Charlaine Harris builds a genuinely ambitious alternate-history setting here, closer to weird western and fantasy than to her supernatural-mystery series — Lizbeth is a competent, dangerous professional first and a romantic lead second, and the series takes real interest in the politics and worldbuilding of its fractured America alongside her personal story.

Harris wrote six novels between 2019 and 2025, closing out the story as a complete arc rather than an open-ended series — The Last Wizards' Ball (2025) was explicitly written and marketed as the saga's ending. This is the series for readers who want Harris's plain-spoken, competence-focused voice applied to a much bigger canvas than her small-town mystery series — alternate history, magic, and a rolling cast of nations rather than one town's secrets.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with An Easy Death (2019). This is a single continuous saga rather than episodic mysteries — the fractured-America setting, Lizbeth's found family, and an overarching political plot involving the Russian grigoris develop and escalate across all six books toward a planned conclusion, so reading out of order will cost you real plot and worldbuilding context. The series is complete: six novels across six years, concluding with The Last Wizards' Ball (2025), which Harris wrote as the saga's deliberate ending.