Book Series

Meet Sophie and Cassie — The Magic Room Is Here

I’m thrilled to share that my debut novel, The Magic Room: A Crime Pattern Casebook is available now. It’s the first book in The Crime Pattern Casebooks, a five-volume series that follows two law enforcement analysts over twenty-five years, from late 2001 into 2026. Each book covers a five-year span, and as the years pass, the characters, the crimes, and the technology all evolve.  The Magic Room opens the series in Buffalo, New York, in early 2002.

Here’s what makes these books a little different:

Most crime fiction is about the people with guns and badges—the chase, the arrest, the heroics. My books are about the people at the desks. Sophie Russo is a civilian crime analyst for the Buffalo Police Department. Cassie Cassidy is an FBI analyst co-located with her in a small analysis center that the two of them quietly nickname “the magic room.” They don’t kick down doors. They find patterns. They take scattered reports—propane thefts, burglaries, a string of attacks nobody else has connected yet—and slowly assemble data into meaning. That work is the heart of every story.

I spent years as a crime analyst myself, first at the local level in Buffalo and later as a federal investigative analyst, and what I most wanted to put on the page is what that job actually looks like. The slow assembly. The wins that come one officer at a time. The frustration of seeing a pattern and not being able to get anyone to act on it. The friendship between two women doing demanding work with far fewer resources than they need. It’s a procedural for readers who like to think.

Buffalo is very much a character here too—the snow, the neighborhoods, the geography. The city is real. The crimes are invented.

If that sounds like your kind of book, it's available now in  paperback and on Kindle. Book 2, The Curry Connection: A Crime Pattern Casebook, follows in October 2026.

I’d love to have you along for the whole twenty-five years. It starts in the magic room.