Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Baby’s Bones | 2015 | Rebecca Alexander | Buy |
| 2 | A Shroud of Leaves | 2019 | Rebecca Alexander | Buy |
The Sage Westfield series by Rebecca Alexander features archaeologist Sage Westfield, whose professional work keeps pulling her into criminal investigations. The first book, A Baby’s Bones (2015), begins when skeletal remains of a woman and baby are found during a cottage renovation, and Sage’s archaeological dig starts to overlap with a modern-day missing persons case.
The second book, A Shroud of Leaves (2019), finds Sage called in when a young woman goes missing and a body is discovered under a pile of leaves in a historic garden. Again, the archaeological and criminal threads wind together as Sage digs into both the site’s history and the circumstances of the crime.
Both books work as standalone mysteries, though reading them in order gives a better sense of Sage’s character development. The series sits between Alexander’s dark fantasy Jackdaw Hammond trilogy and her lighter cottage-set women’s fiction, offering a grounded mystery style with historical research woven into contemporary crime plots.