Judy Alter

Author Information
Judy Alter's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    39 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1988
  • Latest Book:
    August 2022
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Full Series List in Order

A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery

1 - Murder at the Blue Plate Cafe (Feb-2013)
2 - Murder at the Tremont House (Mar-2014)
3 - Murder at Peacock Mansion (Nov-2015)
4 - Murder at the Bus Depot (Apr-2018)

A Kelly O'Connell Mystery

1 - Skeleton in a Dead Space (Sep-2011)
2 - No Neighborhood for Old Women (May-2012)
3 - Trouble in a Big Box (Aug-2012)
4 - Danger Comes Home (Jul-2013)
5 - Deception in Strange Places (Aug-2014)
6 - Desperate for Death (May-2015)
6.5 - No Neighbohood for Old Women (Feb-2017)
7 - The Color of Fear (Jul-2017)
8 - Contract for Chaos (Jun-2018)

Maggie

1 - Maggie and a Horse Named Devildust (Feb-1989)
2 - Maggie and the Search for Devildust (Oct-1989)
3 - Maggie and Devildust-Ridin' High! (Dec-1990)

Book List in Order: 39 titles

  • Mattie

    Young Mattie, poor and illegitimate, was introduced to an entirely new world when she was hired to care for the daughter of an influential doctor. By sheer grit and determination, she eventually became a doctor herself and set up her practice amid th...

  • Maggie and a Horse Named Devildust

    Maggie - 1

  • Maggie and the Search for Devildust

    Maggie - 2

  • Maggie and Devildust-Ridin' High!

    Maggie - 3

  • Katie and the Recluse

    The Adventures of Katie Sheridan who learns to accept people as they are... While her own family is breaking up in Ponder, Texas, in 1954, thirteen-year-old Katie Sheridan is determined to get to know the town recluse, Miss Ina Fay Bagley. Miss ...

  • Ballad for Sallie

    The Gunfighter... Longhair Jim Courtright had been both a marshal and a desperado - and in Hell's Half Acre, the roughest part of Fort Worth, he was a living legend. His skill with a gun had made him a hero in some people's eyes...and a killer in oth...

  • Libbie

    More than 100 years after his death at Little Big Horn, General George Armstrong Custer remains firmly entrenched in the American imagination. Alter, a Golden Spur winner, looks at the Custer myth from the first-person perspective of his widow, Eliza...

  • Unbridled Spirits: Short Fiction about Women in the Old West

    Was the West really hell on horses and women? Not always. This collection of short stories refutes the traditional stereotypes of women in western fiction -- the pure schoolmarm, the soiled dove with a heart of gold, the worn and weary settler's wife...

  • Jessie

    Strong, impulsive, and as daring as any man of her day, Jessie Benton was her father's daughter, and never so much as when she defied him. At seventeen, against Senator Thomas Benton's express wishes, she eloped with the handsome young explorer John ...



  • Cherokee Rose

    She was born on an Oklahoma ranch, where her father taught her to rope and ride. Filled with daydreams of joining Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Tommy Jo Burns knew she was destined for greatness as a famous trick roper. At fourteen, she so impressed...

  • Callie Shaw, Stable Boy

    "No girl's allowed! No girls are allowed to work in the racing stables . . . Not even with your aunt's permission!" How many times had Callie heard the man say it? Not that Aunt Edna would ever agree anyway. Aunt Edna always said that horse racing...

  • Santa Fe Trail

  • Legend

    in Legend

    Seven winners of the Spur Award--including Elmer Kelton and Loren D. Estleman--come together to document the life of the legendary Lyle Speaks, from his tormented childhood to his years as a cattle rancher and his regrettable exploits in between. Ori...

  • Sundance, Butch and Me

    She was born Martha Baird, but history will always remember her as Etta Place, the woman who rode with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, the outlaws led by Butch Cassidy and Etta's lover, the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance are two of the most famous outla...

  • Sam Houston is My Hero

    Fourteen-year-old Cat Jennings lives -- and works -- on a hardscrabble farm outside Bastrop, Texas, with her parents, an older brother Charlie, and three younger children -- Holly, Benjie, and Susanna. But her father has gone to fight at the Alamo, a...

  • Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories

    Fifteen stories t that are funny and sad, modern and historical, urban and rural. They focus on women in the American West peaking in their own voices, sharing the universal female complexities of time and place. Characters -- old women, ingénue, br...

  • Souvenirs from Space

    This book, written for young people ages eight to twelve, tells readers in clear terms what meteorites are, where they come from, what kinds there are, how to look for them, what to look for if you find a rock you think might be a meteorite. It encou...

  • After Pa Was Shot

    After her pa is shot in a turn-of-the-century Texas gunfight, 12-year-old Ellsbeth James has no time to go chasing off after the killer. She has to buckle down and take care of her mother and siblings, B.J., Little Henry and Maggie. "Time and place ...

  • The Art of Candle Dipping

    A short story, historical fiction, set on the Texas frontier in the 1880s about the effects of a Comanche attack on a woman and her family. Based on a true story.The hot wax for candle dipping figures in the way the woman saved her children. Told fro...



  • Skeleton in a Dead Space

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 1

    An endearing sleuth, a skeleton behind the spice cupboard, and a fistful of subplots that will keep you guessing. A nicely done debut by an author to watch. -- Susan Wittig Albert, author of the China Bayles mysteries Award-winning historical noveli...

  • No Neighborhood for Old Women

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 2

    Claire Guthrie shoots and wounds her husband the same night that Florence Dodson, Kelly O’Connell’s former neighbor, supposedly falls down her back steps, hits her head, and dies. Kelly knows it’s murder, but she has a hard time convincing Mike...

  • Trouble in a Big Box

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 3

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery, Book Three Kelly O’Connell has her hands full: her husband Mike Shandy is badly injured in an automobile accident that kills a young girl, developer Tom Lattimore wants to build a big-box grocery store called Wild Things ...

  • Murder at the Blue Plate Cafe

    A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery - 1

    When twin sisters Kate and Donna inherit their grandmother’s restaurant, the Blue Plate Café in Wheeler, Texas, there’s immediate conflict. Donna wants to sell and use her money to establish a B & B; Kate wants to keep the Café. Thirty-two-year...

  • Danger Comes Home

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 4

    Kelly O’Connell’s husband, Mike Shandy, insists she has a talent for trouble, but how can she sit idly by while her world is shattering. Daughter Maggie is hiding a runaway classmate; protégé Joe Mendez seems to be hanging out again with his fo...

  • Murder at the Tremont House

    A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery - 2

    A journalist comes to Wheeler, Texas, intent on revealing the town’s secrets. Instead she finds a stubborn advocate of the town in Kate Chambers, and the tangled story leads to murder, kidnapping and a high-speed chase. When free-lance journalist S...

  • The Perfect Coed

    Susan Hogan is smart, pretty -- and prickly. There was no other word for it. She is prickly with Jake Phillips and her Aunt Jenny, the two people who love her most in the world. And she is prickly and impatient with some of her academic colleagues an...

  • Deception in Strange Places

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 5

    A woman desperately seeking her biological mother, a televangelist determined to thwart that search, a hired hit man, and in the midst of it all, a reclusive diva. Kelly has gotten herself involved in a dangerous emotional tangle this time, and Mike ...

  • Desperate for Death

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 6

    Just when Kelly's life has calmed, she faces yet another of life's puzzles. Except the pieces in this one don't fit. First the apartment behind her house is torched, then a string of bizzare "accidents" occur to set her off-balance. Who is stalking h...

  • Murder at Peacock Mansion

    A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery - 3

    Arson, a bad beating, and a recluse who claims someone is trying to kill her all collide in this third Blue Plate Café Mystery with Kate Chambers. Torn between trying to save David Clinkscales, her old boss and new lover, and curiosity about Edith A...



  • The Gilded Cage

    Born to society and a life of privilege, Bertha Honoré married Potter Palmer, a wealthy entrepreneur who called her Cissy. Neither dreamed the direction the other’s life would take. He built the Palmer House Hotel, still famed today, and became on...

  • No Neighbohood for Old Women

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 6.5

    When a serial killer begins targeting older women in Fort Worth's Fairmount neighborhood, realtor/renovator Kelly O'Connell investigates, in spite of the pleas of her companion, policeman Mike Shandy, and her assistant, the colo...

  • The Color of Fear

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 7

    The Color of Fear marks Judy Alter’s return to mystery fiction and the Kelly O’Connell series after an absence of more than a year. This time, the indomitable Keisha narrates the short tale wherein Kelly and her family live under the threat of in...

  • Pigface and the Perfect Dog

    A college student, dead, in an empty pasture. Rifle-carrying strangers in the local grocery store. An irresistible and loveable Labrador puppy. These add up to trouble for Susan Hogan, associate professor of English at Oak Grove (Texas) University, a...

  • Murder at the Bus Depot

    A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery - 4

    Is the depot a symbol of the worst episode in a town’s history or does it stand for revitalization, bringing the citizens of Wheeler together with pride in their community?Kate Chamber’s trouble antenna go up when Dallas developer Silas Fletcher ...

  • Contract for Chaos

    A Kelly O'Connell Mystery - 8

    When four young men sign the rental contract on a Fairmount House, realtor Kelly O’Connell has no idea she has just signed a contract for chaos. But the racial tensions sweeping the country erupt in Fort Worth, and her tenants fan the flames. A you...

  • So Far From Paradise

    .Ranching is a man’s story, but in So Far from Paradise, Cassie Belden recalls the story from a woman’s point of view -- life on the plains of North Texas, the Comanche and Kiowa raids, the cattle drives, the building of an empire, and finally th...

  • Saving Irene

    Irene Foxglove wishes she were a French chef. Henrietta James, her assistant, knows she is nothing more than a small-time TV chef on a local Chicago channel. And yet when Irene is threatened, Henny tries desperately to save her, wishing always that M...

  • Irene in Danger

    Want a French recipe? Irene will teach you to make salad niçoise. Want murder and mayhem? Irene seems to attract both. With one week until her wedding, Henny James is convinced Irene's arrival from France will ruin the biggest day of her life. O...

  • Sundance, Butch & Me

    Sundance, Butch & Me tells the story of Etta Place-an outlaw woman whose original identity may never be known. She accompanied the leaders of the Wild Bunch as they ran rampant over the American West, traveled to New York City, and finally fled to So...



Award-Winning Books by Judy Alter

Mattie
1988 SPUR Award -- Western Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Judy Alter has published 39 books.

Judy Alter does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Sundance, Butch & Me, was published in August 2022.

The first book by Judy Alter, Mattie, was published in January 1988.

Yes. Judy Alter has 3 series.
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