Roberta "Robbie" Jordan is the proud owner of the Pans n' Pancakes, a restaurant for breakfast and lunch with a general store of antique cookware (and later on in the series, also includes B&B rooms) in her late mother's hometown of South Lick, Indiana. While tending to her shop, she gets herself involved in solving murders that pop up over town.
The series consists of:
- #01: Flipped for Murder (2015)
- #02: Grilled for Murder (2016)
- #03: When the Grits Hit the Fan (2017)
- #04: Biscuits and Slashed Browns (2018)
- #05: Death Over Easy (2018)
- #06: Strangled Eggs and Ham (2019)
- #06.5: "Christmas Cocoa and a Corpse" (2019)note
- #07: Nacho Average Murder (2020)
- #08: Candy Slain Mystery/Murder (2020)
- #09: No Grater Crime (2021)
- #10: Batter Off Dead (2022)
- #10.5: "Scarfed Down" (2022) note
- #11: Four Leaf Cleaver (2023)
- #12: Deep Fried Death (2023)
This series provides examples of:
- A Dog Named "Cat": Robbie names the cat she adopts "Birdie", due to his purring sounding like a bird's chirp.
- Alliterative Name: Buck Bird.
- Asshole Victim: Hard to be a murder mystery series without them...
- Stella Rogers of "Flipped for Murder", being that she was a blackmailer. She even knew of Ed Kowalski mistreating and sexually harassing his female employees, and just decided to squeeze him for money, instead of, y'know, helping them...
- Professor Charles Stilton of When the Grits Hit the Fan. The little we see of him shows him to be a snobbish homophobe who is horribly abusive to his wife. Granted, she's not that much better of a person and that's not why she killed him...
- ...which brings us to Maude herself. A deeply disturbed woman who killed another girl when she was in their teens so she would have a chance with the boy they liked. She kills her husband in the same way and nearly kills Robbie before Abe shoots her with an arrow.
- Professor Warren Connolly of Biscuits and Slashed Browns.
- Both averted and downplayed with the victims of No Grater Crime. The aversion is for Jeremiah Ward, a kind churchgoer whose only crime is being in Pans n' Pancakes when omelets with toxic mushrooms are being served. The downplayed one is Jan Krueger, who was quite unpleasant to Robbie, but certainly didn't deserve to be poisoned.
- Big Eater: Buck Bird, who's in Pans n' Pancakes everyday since it opens.
- Bittersweet Ending: In a sense for Death Over Easy. Sure, Pia Bianchi's killer has been caught, but it turns out Gina Berry's Killer was her own husband. So now their daughter is all alone, considering her sister Erica was the victim of Grilled for Murder.
- Blackmail Backfire: Stella Rogers of Flipped For Murder had a reputation for blackmailing citizens of South Lick. This gets her shot in the back when one of them has had enough.
- Cool Old Lady: Robbie's aunt Adele, naturally.
- Christmas Episode: The short anthology stories "Christmas Cocoa and a Corpse" and "Scarfed Down", as well as the full book Candy Slain Mystery.
- Death by Falling Over: How Erica actually died in Grilled For Murder. She was flirting with her sister's husband and he slapped her across the face. This sent her falling and she struck her head on the stairs of his house.
- Subverted in Biscuits and Slashed Browns. A character certainly thinks they killed Warren Connolly this way, but it just stunned him. It's what let the actual killer get Warren into their car and kill him.
- This is also how Jed Greenberg met his end in Christmas Cocoa and a Corpse. His wife set up a patch of ice on the route he would be walking Cocoa the dog, hoping he would be injured and stop hurting her for awhile. However, he struck his head on a metal fence and died.
- Eye Scream: Max Shermer gets this from Robbie in Grilled For Murder when she jams a lockpick into his eyes in self defense.
- The killer of Candy Slain Mystery gets this too, albeit with pepper spray instead of something pointy.
- Fat Bastard: Ed Kowalski from Flipped for Murder is a pretty fat man. He lets his country store get to the point where rats are running around it, sexually harasses his female employees, and tries to sabotage Robbie's store by claiming she has rats, even collecting the droppings from his rats. Oh, and not only is he the murderer, he tries to frame Robbie for it and then tries to kill her when she figures it out.
- Foreshadowing: Buck says that his mother was murdered when he was younger towards the end of No Grater Crime. Her murder becomes important in the next book, Batter Off Dead.
- The first line of Batter Off Dead is "This heat could make anyone commit murder". You just had to jinx things, didn't you Abe?
- Hate Sink: Dr. William Geller of Candy Slain Mystery. The man is a grouch, an Islamophobic bigot, and a misogynist. That last part must have made it pretty easy for him to kill his wife and her sister, and possibly two other women.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Ed Kowalski from Flipped for Murder rubs it in Robbie's face that her pen (containing the logo for her mother's old business and thus very distinct) was found at the scene of the crime, thus making her look pretty guilty for Stella's murder. The thing is, Buck had only shared that info with Robbie and Jim. So the only way he could have known that is if he put the pen there himself.
- Known Only by Their Nickname: Robbie's aunt Adele and her father Roberto are the only ones who call her by her name of Roberta.
- Buck Bird, the local cop. Candy Slain Mystery reveals his full name to be Buckham Hamilton Bird.
- Innocent Bystander: Jeremiah Ward, the old man who dies in No Grater Crime. All the guy did was take an omelet from Adele that she couldn't eat. It was filled with poisonous mushrooms to sabotage Robbie's store, and it costs him his life.
- Inspector Lestrade: Detectives Octavia Slade and Oscar Thompson. Downplayed, as the two are very competent in their own rights.
- Missing Mom:
- Robbie's mother Janine has been dead for three years at the start of the series.
- Jan Krueger, mother to Sean O'Neill and Abe's ex-wife, is killed when she's poisoned by Krystal Krueger.
- Obfuscating Disability: Dr. William Geller has a prosthetic leg, and limps around South Lick. But that's all an act, as he moves around the hospital he works at with no problem. That limp is part of covering up his wife's murder. After all, how could a man who walks like that possibly haul a woman up to his attic?
- Pun-Based Title: Each book after the first two books, which were for some sort of cooking term followed by "for Murder" now has a title based on some sort of breakfast food.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Warren Connolly from Biscuits and Slashed Browns. It's revealed that he once dated Robbie's friend Christina, and ended up raping her, getting off scot free. What makes it worse is that Christina is a lesbian.
- Romantic False Lead: Flipped for Murder seems like Robbie will fall in love with Jim Shermer. However, he gets back together with Detective Slade, and for the rest of the books, Abe O'Neill is her love interest and eventual husband.
- Serial Killer: Dr. William Geller is possibly one of these. Detective Slade says that now they know how he killed the Franklin sisters, they're looking into his possible involvement in the deaths of two other women.
- Shower of Love: In When the Grits Hit the Fan, Robbie says she skips her daily shower one day because she and Abe took one together after they demolished some walls to allow Robbie to build her B&B rooms. She doesn't outright say they had sex, but she describes it as "washing off the plaster dust in the most delightful of ways".
- Slashed Throat: How Warren Connolly is murdered.
- St. Patrick's Day Episode: Four Leaf Cleaver.
- Tampering with Food and Drink:
- The police suspect this may have caused the death of Jed Greenberg in "Christmas Cocoa and a Corpse", believing the hot cocoa packets Robbie is selling may have been poisoned. They weren't, Jed died when he hit his head on a metal fence slipping on ice.
- Played straight in No Grater Crime, where an old man dies from eating a mushroom omelet containing poisonous mushrooms and Jan Krueger when she eats quiches with the same mushrooms.
- Vacation Episode: Nacho Average Murder sees Robbie returning to her hometown of Santa Barbara, California, for her high school reunion.
- Wedding Episode: No Grater Crime ends with Robbie marrying Abe.
- Wham Episode:
- Candy Slain Murder ends with Abe proposing to Robbie, which she accepts.
- Four Leaf Cleaver has Robbie find out she's pregnant, after a while of trying.
