Molly Murphy

About the Molly Murphy series

Molly Murphy flees Ireland in 1901 after killing a man in self-defense, arrives at Ellis Island with a dead woman's identity papers, and lands in New York City with nothing but nerve and an accidental talent for getting mixed up in murders. She becomes one of the city's only female private investigators, working cases the police won't take from a converted tenement office, while immigrant New York — Tammany Hall corruption, sweatshop labor, Broadway theater, the settlement-house movement — unfolds around her in vivid, well-researched detail.

Rhys Bowen writes turn-of-the-century New York with real texture: the Lower East Side tenements, the Irish and Jewish immigrant communities, the era's casual sexism Molly has to out-think rather than fight head-on. It's cozy mystery with a genuine feminist edge and a slow-building romance with police captain Daniel Sullivan that spans the whole series. Longtime readers watch Molly's life change permanently — marriage, motherhood, the demands of running a detective agency as a wife and mother in 1900s New York — which gives the later books, co-written with Clare Broyles after 2017, a different flavor: Molly is now investigating as a settled woman navigating an era hurtling toward women's suffrage and the First World War, rather than the green immigrant of book one. It's for readers who want Gilded Age New York history wrapped around a genuinely clever mystery, with a heroine defined by grit rather than gentility.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Murphy's Law. Molly's circumstances — her legal status, her relationship with Daniel Sullivan, eventually her marriage and family — change permanently and irreversibly across the series, so reading out of order will spoil major life developments. There is no separate chronological order; the books are written and set in sequence.

Away in a Manger (2015) is a full-length entry that fits between The Edge of Dreams and Time of Fog and Fire in the main numbered sequence, not a side story to skip. Rhys Bowen wrote the series solo through The Ghost of Christmas Past (2017); starting with Wild Irish Rose (2022) she has co-written the series with Clare Broyles, continuing Molly's story into the 1900s with no change in reading order.