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Erica Obey is an American author of mystery and historical mystery novels.

Particularly passionate about writing mysteries set in the Hudson Valley, she is best known for writing the award-winning The Curse of the Braddock Brides (2017).

Erica, who is a former president of the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, is also a regular reviewer and contest judge.

She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from City College of New York, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from City University of New York.

Prior to becoming an author of fiction, Erica published academic work on female folklorists.

She currently lives with her beloved husband and an army of cats in a historic arts colony in Woodstock, New York.

Whenever he isn't writing, Erica can be found hiking or gardening.

More about Erica Obey

Genres: Historical Mystery, Mystery

Born: 1959

United States

Website: https://ericaobey.com/

Non Series

  • The Wunderkammer of Lady Charlotte Guest (2006)
  • Back to the Garden (2013)
  • The Lazarus Vector (2016)
  • The Curse of the Braddock Brides (2017)
  • The Horseman’s Word (2019)
  • Dazzlepaint (2021)
  • The Brooklyn North Murders (2023)

Detailed book overview

Non Series

The Wunderkammer of Lady Charlotte Guest

The Wunderkammer of Lady Charlotte Guest examines the life of a truly extraordinary Victorian woman, Lady Charlotte Guest Schreiber. Lady Charlotte learned Welsh in order to provide the first complete tranlsation of the Mabinogion; ran her late husband’s iron mill until her eldest son attained his majority; then married a man fourteen years her junior and enjoyed a distinguished career as a collector of porcelain, playing cards, and fans. 

Although Lady Charlotte’s biography is fascinating in its own right, the scholarly emphasis of this book centers on how the impulse to collect informed her translations and her journals, as well as her later catalogues. 

Using the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mieke Bol, Susan Miller, and Susan Pierce, this book examines how collection allowed Lady Charlotte to create a series of private signifying systems that often countered the prevailing Victorian discourse assigned to women.

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2006
ISBN: 978-0934223881
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Back to the Garden

When Laura Converse goes to Woodstock to ghost-write a memoir for a name-dropping psychic, she never expects to be mistaken for a long-vanished singer. But she quickly finds herself trying to convince everyone in this New Age Mecca that she has not been sent by supernatural forces in order to solve a twenty-five-year-old murder. And that is hardly likely to prove more difficult than convincing herself that she's not about to fall for a distractingly attractive gardener, who just might be a warlock -- or a murderer.

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2013
ISBN: 978-1432826390
Publisher: Five Star
The Lazarus Vector

When Professor Clare Malley, a medievalist teaching at a Catholic university in New York City, is asked to discover why sixteen-year-old Jonas Crosswell did not die in a drug-related shoot-out at a neighborhood church, the last thing she expects is a modern-day miracle. But how else to explain how the boy survived multiple gunshot wounds? 

Was it a miracle performed by the mysterious Father Enoch? Or did St. Lazarus himself intervene? And what does Jonas's experience have to do with Sean, the troubled heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who vanished after he was also supposedly miraculously cured? 

When Clare tries to discover whether there is a connection between Jonas and Sean, she uncovers an all-too-real, unholy conspiracy to use neighborhood drug dealers as unknowing guinea pigs. Sean may be the only one who can answer her questions and the only one who can truly touch her heart."

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2016
ISBN: 978-1943075225
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group
The Curse of the Braddock Brides

Lord Hardcastle, a single man with a title and a slew of poor female relations, may be in need of a wife, but that doesn’t mean American heiress Libba Wadsworth is interested. Not with the mysterious, orchid hunter Will Ransome lurking about.

Rather than endure yet another awful Coming-out Season of boring balls and vacuous visits from suitors, Libba Wadsworth, in one of her more self-indulgent moments, contemplates the romantic thrill of throwing herself off Cora’s Leap to go down in history as yet another of the cursed Braddock Brides. She knows full well she won’t do it, but still ... the men she’s had to endure season after season certainly made a leap into the abyss appealing. 

Until one Lord Hardcastle comes to call and Will Ransome, claiming to be Hardcastle’s batman and an adventurous orchid hunter, shows up. But can she trust either of them? And, more importantly, are they really who they claim to be?

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-1940442181
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
The Horseman’s Word

It is July of 1865, and in Saratoga Springs, the wealthy racegoers wish, in the words of General Daniel Sickles, who left a leg at Gettysburg, “to let bygones be bygones” and put the war behind them. Yet, Rose Adair is hard pressed to forget Tamerlane Fallon, the Englishman she last saw being led off to be hanged as a Confederate spy. 

When he is pulled from Congress Spring, after apparently having killed a man over a mysterious, smuggled artifact, Rose is forced to sort through conflicting tales of Fenian rebels and the occult Society of the Horseman’s Word, in order to discover the truth about a very real and very dangerous conspiracy that threatens not just the racing season, but the entire future of the country.

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2019
Ebook: B07RZCXQT5
Dazzlepaint

Gavin Fellowes, a damaged WWI veteran turned cynical psychic investigator, arrives in Ker-Ys, a Utopian art colony in Woodstock, NY, to investigate a series of purported fairy kidnappings of Communist garment workers who have taken over the failed Overlook Mountain House above the village. He is rapidly confronted with the willful blind spots of the well-meaning artists and the burgeoning anti-Semitism of the Catskills. 

With the help of Kate Ames, an illustrator and dazzlepaint designer who once might have been kidnapped by the fairies herself, Gavin must dig beneath the myth and legend to uncover an all-too-real occult threat that looms over Europe in the aftermath of the Great War.

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2021
ISBN: 978-1940442365
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group
The Brooklyn North Murders

A hedge fund billionaire dives into a lake in full view of witnesses watching a triathlon — and disappears. Can this possibly be connected to his plans to turn sleepy Morgansburg, N.Y. into a tech hub to rival Silicon Valley? It couldn’t possibly be that he was snatched by Morgansburg’s own answer to the Loch Ness Monster: a dragon named Battlefield Amy.

Dive right into the first full-length Watson & Doyle mystery — featuring librarian and genius programmer Mary Watson and her AI sidekick, Doyle — and read a sneak peek excerpt here.

Author: Erica Obey
First Release: 2023
ISBN: 9781940442457
Publisher: Walrus Publishing